I 


/ .  3 . 


LIBRARY  OF  THE  THEOLOGICAL  SEMINARY 


PRINCETON,  N.  J. 


Presented  by 


~Ye<?\ ce  Comm  \Vr<se  o\~¥Yw\c\  ^6e(7\v\ U  PneerVinc/. 


I  ■  »  ’  w  •  •  *  •  ■ 

^  vj  '  O 


Division. 


. nsz  3 


Section... 


...  >1.7  Z 


JPresente&  by 

Peace  Committee 

of  Phiia.  Yearly  Meeting. 


CHRIST  OR  MARS 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


Or  n 


/  V 


BY 


*  JA  N  3'  1924  * 


A 


WILL  IRWIN 


AUTHOR  OP  “THE  NEXT  WAR,”  “THE  LATIN  AT  WAR,” 


“A  REPORTER  AT  ARMAGEDDON,”  ETC.,  ETC. 


/ 


D.  APPLETON  AND  COMPANY 

NEW  YORK  : :  1923  :  :  LONDON 


COPYRIGHT,  1923,  BY 

D.  APPLETON  AND  COMPANY 


PRINTED  IN  THE  UNITED  STATES  OP  AMERICA 


TO 

INEZ  HAYNES  IRWIN 

WHOSE  MIND  BEST  OF  ALL  I  KNOW 
KEPT  ITS  BALANCE  AMIDST  THE  STORMS  OF  WAR 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Archive 
in  2019  with  funding  from 
Princeton  Theological  Seminary  Library 


https://archive.Org/details/christormars00irwi 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER  PAGE 

I.  Verdun,  1916 . 1 

II.  The  Voice . 15 

III.  The  Things  That  Are  Qesar’s  ...  23 

IV.  The  Hymn  of  Hate . ...  41 

V.  Keeping  the  Poison  Active  ....  59 

VI.  What  Does  It  Matter?  ....  90 

VII.  The  Kingdom . 109 

VIII.  War  Ceases  to  Pay . 117 

IX.  The  Human  Loss . 141 

X.  Justice  between  Nations  .  .  .  .161 

XI.  The  Thing  That  Is  God’s  ....  170 

XII.  Pas-de-Calais,  1918 . 180 


VII 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


CHAPTER  I 
VERDUN,  1916 

To-morrow’s  dinner,  if  dinner  I  had  at  all, 
would  find  me  in  very  different  surroundings, 
I  reflected.  As  for  the  French  captain  who 
had  left  me  at  the  door  of  the  restaurant  with 
a  cheerful  “see  you  in  the  morning”!  he  was 
going  hack  with  me  to  Verdun  not  as  a  mere 
spectator,  but  as  a  participant;  he  might  sup 
with  Pluto.  The  great  battle  which  turned  the 
tide  of  war  had  now  lasted  five  months,  and 
had  already  killed  as  many  men  as  the  North 
lost  in  the  Civil  War.  For  all  we  could  see  of 
the  future,  the  fierce  German  attacks  on  fort 
and  citadel  might  go  on  through  endless  years, 
until  a  mere  squad  of  survivors  staggered  through 
to  unopposed  victory.  Instinctively  you  thought 
of  an  order  to  Verdun  as  a  death  sentence. 

However,  the  company,  now,  was  pleasant  and 
congenial — a  most  agreeable  and  intelligent 
French  couple  in  official  life,  an  American  couple 

l 


2 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


who,  though  they  had  lived  long  enough  abroad 
to  acquire  the  Continental  point  of  view,  retained 
the  humor  and  easy  cordiality  of  American  man¬ 
ners.  No  epicure  could  quarrel  with  the  smallest 
detail  of  the  fare;  and  the  restaurant,  though  a 
little  stripped  and  chilly  on  first  view,  still  radi¬ 
ated  that  atmosphere  of  cheerful  comfort  with 
which  the  French  always  deck  out  the  ritual  of 
eating.  France,  now  mid-course  of  the  Great 
War,  had  survived  her  first  stage  of  grief,  appre¬ 
hension,  disorganization ;  but  was  yet  to  live 
through  that  second  stage  of  orderly  confusion 
initiated  by  the  American  intervention.  She  had 
settled  down  to  a  pale  imitation  of  her  old  life. 

These  my  companions  were  old  and  valued 
patrons,  it  appeared.  Wherefore  the  solicitous 
head  waiter  approached  presently  with  an  inquiry 
about  the  entree,  as  the  polite  opening  for  a  little 
intimate  conversation. 

“When  are  we  going  to  have  our  music  again  ?” 
asked  the  Frenchman.  4 ‘That  superb  orchestra! 
The  solo  violinist  who  played  so  divinely  that  he 
drew  your  heart  from  your  breast — what  has  be¬ 
come  of  him  ?  ”  A  murmur  went  round  the  table. 
Apparently  all  remembered  that  solo  violinist. 

“He  is  dead,”  replied  the  head  waiter. 

“Dead?”  came  the  sympathetic,  concerned  echo. 

The  head  waiter  laughed.  It  was  an  unpleasant 


VERDUN,  1916 


3 


laugh,  pulling  his  lips  hack  from  his  teeth  like 
those  of  a  snarling  dog.  Our  party  looked  up 
with  inquiry  in  their  eyes. 

“He  was  a  Boche!”  said  the  head  waiter. 
“Oh!” 

The  head  waiter  nodded.  “But  yes.  His  real 
name  was  Hans.  Two  days  before  the  first  of 
August,  he  slipped  away  to  Germany  and  joined 
his  regiment.  He  was  killed  at  the  Battle  of  the 
Marne.  Messieurs  and  Mesdames,  I  will  tell  you 
something  strange.  The  owner  of  this  restaurant 
owns  a  chateau  on  the  Ourcq.  Before  his  gate, 
a  detachment  of  the  Boche  make  a  stand.  They 
are  annihilated  by  our  coffee  miUs.  When  every¬ 
thing  is  over,  the  proprietor  sends  out  to  bury 
the  dead.  And  the  first  piece  of  German  carrion 
they  pick  up — it  is  Hans — our  dear  Hans!” 

Our  table  laughed  with  him  now.  He  had  spoken 
rather  loudly;  the  tables  to  the  right  and  left 
had  been  listening;  the  laughter  spread.  It  had 
that  same  disagreeable  quality — the  lips  drawn 
back  from  the  teeth,  the  nostrils  snarling — this 
requiem  of  Hans  who  once  had  “drawn  the  heart 
from  vour  bosom”  with  his  violin,  and  had  be- 
come  now  merely  German  carrion. 

Sunday  morning  I  stood  in  a  gully  of  the  hills, 
under  the  guns  of  Verdun.  From  the  ridge  be- 


4 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


hind  me,  onr  concealed  heavy  batteries  were 
shaking  the  very  sand  bags  of  the  dugouts.  The 
gaping,  insensate  mouth  of  a  tunnel  opened  into 
the  hillside  before  me ;  through  it  lines  of  stretcher 
bearers,  their  clothes  and  hair  matted  with  blood 
and  dust,  bore  the  human  wreckage  of  war.  An 
old  barn  served  as  a  temporary  dressing  post; 
for  at  this  point  the  ridges  gave  shelter  from 
direct  fire.  Still,  at  least  one  shell  shower  had 
reached  it ;  where  the  door  had  been  was  a  great, 
irregular  gash  in  the  masonry.  The  puffing  bear¬ 
ers  put  down  their  charges  in  mathematical  rows, 
folded  up  the  stretchers,  plodded  back  to  the 
tunnel,  disappeared  into  its  black  mouth.  Its 
other  end  opened  on  to  those  shell  holes  and 
trenches,  in  which  the  French  were  that  morning 
holding  Fleury.  From  that  direction  the  rattling 
of  machine  guns  punctuated  the  steady  boom  of 
artillery;  and  once  the  heavens  seemed  to  open 
in  a  storm  of  curtain  fire.  Of  these  stolid,  plod¬ 
ding  bearers,  working  with  the  air  of  men  who 
are  doing  simply  a  hard,  disagreeable  and  some¬ 
what  boresome  job,  some  I  knew  would  come  back 
on  their  own  stretchers,  some  not  at  all.  .  .  . 

I  turned  back  to  the  ragged  entrance  of  the 
barn.  Surgeons,  as  filthy  and  matted  as  the  men 
they  served,  were  toiling  with  a  kind  of  silent, 
concentrated  fury.  As  once  and  again  they  looked 


VERDUN,  1916 


5 


my  way,  spared  an  instant  of  human  curiosity 
to  my  strange  uniform,  I  saw  that  their  eyes  were 
bloodshot  and  all  the  lines  of  their  faces  fallen. 
Methodically  they  worked  down  the  rows.  Here 
was  an  infantryman  snatched  so  hastily  from 
under  the  rain  of  steel  that  no  one  had  given  him 
first  aid ;  his  stretcher  had  stained  the  path  from 
the  tunnel  with  a  trail  of  blood.  Him  they  band¬ 
aged,  their  hands  clumsy  with  fatigue.  Another 
had  received  first  aid;  they  simply  inspected  his 
bandages  and  rolled  him  aside  to  await  the  ambu¬ 
lances.  Finally,  there  were  those  at  whom  the 
surgeons  took  one  swift  look;  then  rose  up,  gave 
each  other  a  nod,  or  an  expressive  shrug,  filled 
a  hypodermic  needle.  One  or  another,  standing 
beyond  range  of  the  condemned  man’s  vision — 
as  the  officer  of  the  execution  does  when  he  raises 
his  sword  to  command  the  firing  squad — would 
make  an  almost  imperceptible  gesture. 

From  a  corner,  where  he  had  been  rolling 
bandages,  would  come  the  chaplain,  only  the 
stole  about  his  neck  distinguishing  him  from 
the  other  officers.  If  the  dying  man  could  speak, 
the  priest  would  kneel  beside  him;  there  would 
be  a  whispered  interchange ;  you  would  see 
the  hand  raised  in  absolution.  More  often 
the  man  was  beyond  whispering ;  and  stand¬ 
ing,  with  all  the  authority  and  dignity  of  his 


6 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 

'i 

church  in  his  pose,  the  chaplain  would  begin  the 
last  rites. 

I  turned  back  toward  the  door;  the  pungent, 
disturbing  scent  of  blood  was  unbearably  heavy 
in  my  unaccustomed  nostrils.  The  rows  of 
wounded  had  been  growing ;  for  still  the  artillery 
and  machine  guns  shook  or  rattled  the  hills  of 
Verdun,  and  still  the  bearers  plodded  in  and  out 
of  the  black  hole  with  their  dripping  stretchers. 
Near  the  door,  the  sober  blue  line  was  slashed 
by  a  tinge  of  dull  green.  I  looked  twice  before 
I  recognized  the  tunic  without  buttons,  the  high, 
heavy  boots,  of  a  German  private.  I  stepped  over 
beside  him.  Between  bandages  and  congealed 
blood,  only  his  eyes  and  one  side  of  his  face  were 
visible.  These  showed  him  to  be  young,  blonde, 
thick  of  bone  and  wide  of  skull;  it  needed  no 
uniform  to  classify  him  as  a  Teuton.  From  some¬ 
where  beneath  the  bandages  came  at  long  inter¬ 
vals  a  low,  difficult,  inarticulate  moaning.  Then 
his  eyes  would  roll  upward  until  the  pupils  dis¬ 
appeared  under  the  lids.  .  .  . 

The  surgeons  came  down  the  line,  questioned 
the  next  man,  who  was  talking  volubly;  satisfied 
themselves  that  his  first-aid  bandaging  was  sound. 
Only  then,  apparently,  did  they  perceive  that  the 
next  was  a  German.  Hatred  is  an  emotion  which 
takes  energy ;  it  is  impossible  to  weary  men,  while 


VERDUN,  1916 


7 


curiosity  persists  to  the  end.  Criminals  on  their 
way  to  the  scaffold  will  stare  at  any  unusual  face 
in  the  crowd.  The  eyes  of  the  surgeons,  as  they 
looked  on  him  whose  race  began  all  this  woe, 
showed  no  resentment  but  only  a  little  wonder. 
They  stripped  his  tunic  open  at  the  chest,  began 
their  examination ;  and  I  felt  that  they  were  bend¬ 
ing  backward,  giving  him  special  and  minute  at¬ 
tention. 

Against  his  ghastly  white  skin  lay  the  black 
slash  of  a  crucifix,  the  nailed  feet  bathed  in  a 
rivulet  of  blood.  At  last,  they  straightened  up, 
and  one  flashed  to  the  other  that  fatal,  despairing 
shake  of  the  head.  The  priest  approached.  I 
saw  him  start  slightly  as  he  recognized  the  uni¬ 
form.  I  know  not  if  they  had  any  common  speech 
for  a  confession ;  however,  this  penitent  was  be¬ 
yond  speech.  The  priest  raised  his  hand  in  bene¬ 
diction,  began  the  last  rites. 

I  was  out  in  the  air  now.  Tainted  as  it  was 
with  the  prick  of  burning  explosive,  the  stink  of 
long-exploded  gas  shells,  I  drew  it  into  my  lungs 
like  the  ozone  of  the  Rockies.  The  machine  guns 
had  stopped  their  continuous  rattle.  In  the  spaces 
between  the  booming  of  heavy  cannon,  came  a 
strange  sound — the  chord  of  an  organ,  slight, 
reedlike,  but  solemn.  Down  the  face  of  the  hill 
ran  a  buttress  of  sand  bags  with  a  deeply  cut, 


8 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


recessed  door  and  window.  The  sight  of  the 
bright  June  heavens  recalled  to  me  what  might 
fall  therefrom  at  any  moment;  I  found  myself 
crouching  as  I  crossed  the  road.  Behind  this 
buttress  was  a  long  dugout,  crowded  with  uni¬ 
formed  men  silhouetted  by  a  dim,  far  light.  As 
I  looked,  the  tiny  field  organ  stopped  and  the 
men  before  me  fell  to  their  knees,  revealing  a 
little  altar  with  its  four  candles,  the  back  of  the 
priest.  Then  I  saw  nearest  of  all  two  Germans, 
one  with  a  bandaged  forehead — by  all  signs, 
prisoners  taken  only  that  morning.  Beside  them, 
the  butts  of  their  bayonetted  rifles  resting  on  the 
floor,  knelt  their  guards. 

My  mind,  flashing  rapidly,  vividly  from  im¬ 
pression  to  impression  as  minds  in  battle  will,  re> 
turned  to  that  scene  in  the  restaurant  only  two  long 
days  ago.  At  least,  I  thought,  one  force  in  this 
world  stood  like  a  rock  against  the  tide  of  un¬ 
reasoned,  ulcerous  hatred  begotten  of  the  World 
War.  Christianity  did  not  laugh  because  Hans 
the  violinist  was  dead.  To  his  soul,  with  those 
of  the  embattled  Frenchmen  dying  that  morning 
behind  the  tunnel  of  Fleury,  it  offered  a  common 
haven.  Into  that  Calvary  of  the  battered  old 
barn,  into  this  sacred  spot  behind  the  sand  bags, 
entered  something  so  holy  as  to  absorb  the  poi¬ 
sons  of  hate.  Then  my  mind  made  another  rapid 


VERDUN,  1916 


9 


shift.  It  was  eleven  o’clock  of  Sunday  morning. 
At  that  moment,  my  American  couple  were  doubt¬ 
less  at  the  American  church  in  the  Avenue 
D’Alma,  my  French  couple  at  their  own  Catholic 
church.  The  Protestants,  here  as  elsewhere  the 
world  over,  would  listen  to  the  prayer  for  all  sorts 
and  conditions  of  men,  the  Catholics  to  the  suppli¬ 
cation  “ Graciously  give  peace  in  our  days.” 
These  old  prayers  of  the  Christian  Church  would 
be  as  lost  as  though  unsaid  upon  my  companions 
of  that  dinner  in  Paris.  Indeed,  that  very  morn¬ 
ing  a  thousand  German  and  Austrian  pulpits 
would  thunder  denunciation  of  the  French  and 
English,  would  bid  the  Christian  sons  of  Teutonia 
slay  in  the  name  of  God  and  spare  not;  and  a 
thousand  French  and  British  pulpits  would  turn 
back  this  pious  command  upon  the  heads  of  the 
enemy.  Any  thinking  child  adjusting  himself  as 
a  friendly,  newly  arrived  foreigner  to  the  com¬ 
plexities  and  contradictions  of  this  puzzling  world, 
has  wondered  why  killing  in  peace  is  a  sin  so 
supreme  and  blighting  that  one  mentions  it  only 
in  awed  whispers,  while  killing  in  war  is  not  only 
a  duty  but  a  consecrated  and  glorious  act.  Use 
and  custom  rather  than  reason  had  reconciled  me, 
along  with  the  rest,  to  this  contradiction.  But 
now — the  clear  sight  of  childhood  returned. 

Then  an  explosion  lighter  than  the  rest,  but 


10 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 

X 

with  a  sinister  sharpness,  puffed  a  geyser  of  dust 
from  the  hillside.  We  were  under  fire  again.  As 
we  hurried  to  cover  in  the  Colonel’s  dugout,  al] 
further  thought  yielded  to  the  instinct  of  self- 
preservation. 

Yet  the  wonder  would  not  down.  I  belonged 
to  the  party  of  the  Allies ;  I  believed  that  German 
victory,  as  Germany  stood  then,  meant  only  the 
perpetuation  of  war  spirit  in  the  world;  and  I 
have  not  yet  changed  that  belief.  But  still — I 
wondered.  Most  scholarly  Christians  of  whatever 
denomination  know  Frances  Thompson’s  “The 
Hound  of  Heaven,”  the  great  religious  poem  of 
our  times.  The  man  is  trying  to  escape  from 
God,  who  is  that  “hound.”  But  everywhere  the 
footsteps  of  the  Eternal  follow  him,  with  their 
“deliberate  speed,  majestic  instancy.”  He  tries 
to  hide  in  squirrel  holes  from  God.  He  absorbs 
himself  in  work  and  the  world,  drugs  himself 
with  dissipation.  But  always  there  follow  the 
footsteps,  and  when  he  stops  to  listen  there  is  a 
voice  saying: 

Lo,  naught  contents  thee,  who  content ’st  not  Me. 

So  with  me;  the  footsteps  and  the  Voice,  first 
heard  among  those  men  who  were  about  to  die 
at  Verdun,  followed  me  to  the  Peace  that  was  not 


VERDUN,  1916 


11 


peace,  will  follow  me  always.  I  heard  them  in 
the  dugouts  behind  the  Carso  when  an  Italian 
chaplain  told  me  one  moment  of  certain  delightful 
days  of  his  youth  spent  in  a  seminary  near  Vienna, 
and  the  next  moment  was  spitting  toward  the 
enemy  some  of  the  atrocity  charges  common  on 
all  fronts.  The  footsteps  beat,  the  Voice  sounded, 
in  a  headquarters  of  the  British  front,  when  a 
blood-mad  civilian  visitor — at  home  a  church¬ 
warden  and  a  pillar  of  society — attributed  to  all 
Germans  atrocious  practices  beyond  the  worst 
imaginings  of  bestial  savages.  Through  the  beat 
of  guns,  the  throb  of  aircraft  motors  above  cower¬ 
ing  towns,  the  cheering  of  crowds — still  I  heard 
the  footsteps  and  the  Voice.  At  the  rear,  one  never 
spoke  of  their  deliberate  speed,  majestic  instancy; 
civilians,  doing  their  bit  by  hating  at  comfortable 
firesides,  would  not  have  understood.  But  at  the 
front,  in  trench  and  headquarters  and  dugout,  the 
sensitive  spirits  among  those  men  whose  deeds 
had  approved  their  courage,  whose  consecration 
to  death  had  freed  their  souls — they  talked  in 
short,  erratic  strained  sentences  which  revealed 
their  awareness  of  this  Heavenly  pursuit. 

u  Just  to  die  for  one’s  country  is  not  enough,” 
said  Edith  Cavell  before  they  took  her  out  before 
the  firing  squad.  Those  among  the  soldiers  at  the 
front  who  had  made  their  peace  with  their  own 


12 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


God  before  the  whistle  blew  them  over  the  top — 
still  you  saw  a  trace  of  spiritual  unease  in  their 
eyes,  as  though  the  footsteps  of  the  Hound  of 
Heaven  had  not  yet  ceased,  as  though  the  Voice 
were  not  yet  contented.  This  faith  was  the  high¬ 
est  thing  they  knew;  their  only  life  buoy  in  the 
deluge  of  hate  and  wickedness  which  had  over¬ 
whelmed  the  world.  But  why,  with  Christianity 
everywhere  triumphant,  was  this  thing  permitted 
to  be?  Germany  started  it — yes.  The  soldier  of 
the  Allies  believed  that  in  his  soul,  though  now 
and  then  he  entertained  a  suspicion  that  Germany 
was  not  wholly  to  blame.  But  even  that  Kaiser, 
in  whom  he  loved  to  sum  up  the  rottenness  of 
Germany,  was  a  most  punctilious  observer  of 
Christian  forms,  was  forever  praying  down  vic¬ 
tory  on  German  arms.  At  this  point  most  of  them, 
probably,  gave  up  thinking  and  took  to  the  duties 
of  the  moment.  But  a  few,  in  long,  serious,  mid¬ 
night  talks  at  wayside  inns  of  the  rear  zone,  spoke 
the  full  and  final  thought  of  their  hearts.  It  was 
not  God  nor  Christ  at  fault.  Somewhere,  ex¬ 
pressed  or  implied,  beyond  all  this  stood  an  un¬ 
tarnished  Christ,  be  he  God  or  only  the  genius 
of  goodness  expressing  God.  But  the  organized 
servants  of  our  Christian  God  which  we  call  the 
Church — they  had  somehow  failed.  Beyond  the 
invocations  and  chantings  of  the  Church  sounded 


VERDUN,  1916 


13 


dimly,  insistently,  some  call  of  the  God  whose 
purposes  they  had  not  yet  grasped. 

The  Peace  came,  with  its  new  ignominies.  And 
now  it  was  as  though  not  really  the  men  of  the 
trenches  but  a  whole  world  were  harassed  by  the 
footsteps  which  would  not  cease  from  following, 
the  distant,  persistent  Voice  which  will  not  be 
still. 

Lo,  naught  contents  thee,  who  content ’st  not  Me. 

Is  not  that  the  cause  for  the  bigotries,  the  un¬ 
reason,  the  greeds,  the  renewal  of  old,  gnawing 
hatreds,  which  have  marked  the  world  since  1918  ? 
As  children  are  often  most  irritable  just  before 
they  go  to  sleep,  so  men  are  often  most  unreason¬ 
able  and  wicked  just  before  they  enter  some  quiet 
haven  of  good  conscience. 

In  the  bosoms  of  all  mankind  from  the  exalted 
premier  ruling  in  Government  House  to  the  most 
remote  farmer  reading  the  weekly  news  in  his 
county  paper,  the  consciousness  of  what  this  world 
might  be,  what  it  ought  to  be,  struggles  with  old, 
preconceived  notions  of  patriotism  and  partisan¬ 
ship,  narrow  interpretations  of  self-interest.  Just 
after  the  Armistice,  M.  Gemier,  in  his  touching, 
fantastic  religious  play  La  Grande  Pastorale y 
flashed  before  his  Parisian  audience  a  vision  of 


14 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


Hell  which  showed  the  understanding  of  genius. 
Certain  of  these  damned  creatures  were  suffering 
all  the  conventional  tortures  of  wheel  and  fire. 
But  beyond  that  was  a  spiritual  torture.  They 
ran  in  aimless  circles.  They  worked  for  a  fever¬ 
ish,  hysterical  moment  at  some  impossible,  useless 
task;  then  dropped  it  and  leaped  to  another, 
equally  impossible  and  useless.  They  struggled 
purposelessly  in  contorted  groups.  All  motion, 
all  expression  was  strained,  unnatural,  rocked  by 
an  inner  futility.  This  was  the  real  horror  of 
Gemier’s  conception — these  creatures  of  the  eter¬ 
nal  had  denied  the  purposes  of  eternity;  they 
had  become,  therefore,  machines  without  a  bal¬ 
ance  wheel.  .  .  .  The  world,  in  these  five  years, 
has  seemed  to  me  a  little  like  Gemier’s  Hell. 

We  are  trying  to  hide  in  squirrel  holes  from 
God.  And  the  Church,  which  purports  to  interpret 
to  our  world  His  intentions,  is  hiding  too,  along 
with  publicans  and  sinners,  princes  and  poten¬ 
tates. 


CHAPTER  II 


THE  VOICE 

"Why  do  the  footsteps  follow,  and  what  is  the 
Voice  saying  to  men  of  good  will?  That  Voice 
is  the  expression  of  an  infinite  intelligence  which 
can  tolerate  the  thought  of  eternity,  comprehend 
time  and  space,  as  onr  finite  minds  cannot.  So 
we  may  translate  it  only  into  the  poor  mosaic  of 
human  words,  each  for  himself.  Let  me,  un¬ 
churched  layman  though  I  be,  attempt  my  own 
translation.  Let  me  first,  however — so  that  the 
reader  and  I  may  find  some  firm  and  useful  basis 
of  understanding — try  to  determine  certain  com¬ 
mon  factors  in  all  the  churched  and  unchurched 
creeds  and  varieties  of  Christianity.  And  indeed, 
since  both  faiths  have  a  common  ethical  system, 
what  I  shall  say  of  Christianity  should  apply  just 
>  as  well  to  Judaism. 

There  is  one  God;  a  first  cause.  Man  is  “made 
in  His  image.’ ’  You  may  interpret  this  literally 
or  figuratively.  Broadly  conceived,  it  means  that 
the  spirit  of  man  reflects,  however  dimly,  the 
spirit  of  God;  that  he  approaches  his  possible 

15 


I 


16  CHRIST  OR  MARS? 

perfection  in  so  far  as  he  imitates  God.  The 
material  universe  is  a  creation  of  majestic  and 
exquisite  harmonies;  so,  rightly  understood,  is 
the  mystic,  spiritual  universe.  Whether  you  call 
the  process  4 4 conversion, ’ ’  4 4 holy  living”  or 
4 4 obedience  to  the  Law,”  the  process  which  makes 
the  perfect  Christian  or  the  perfect  Hebrew  con¬ 
sists  in  yielding  his  impulses  and  desires  to  God’s 
purposes  and  will. 

Man,  like  God,  is  an  immortal,  indestructible 
spirit.  This  brief,  visible  life  on  our  tiny  planet 
is  but  a  prologue,  spoken  in  one  weak  word,  to 
an  eternal  drama.  It  is,  however,  man’s  time  of 
test,  the  first  important  period  in  his  growth,  as 
that  of  a  plant  is  the  period  in  the  germ.  Upon 
what  he  does  here  depends,  either  to  an  important 
degree  or  a  supreme  degree,  his  eternal  destinies. 
If  he  has  put  himself  into  harmony  with  God  on 
this  earth  his  spirit  will  4 4 rest  in  peace”;  it  will 
be  well  with  him  hereafter.  If  he  remain  out  of 
harmony  with  God,  it  will  be  in  some  degree  ill. 
His  punishment,  in  the  opinion  of  the  creeds, 
varies  from  an  eternity  of  torture  to  a  period  of 
somber  readjustment. 

What  constitutes  this  oneness  with  God  is  a 
point  where  the  creeds  differ  most  widely,  some 
holding  the  acceptance  of  their  own  peculiar  faiths 
the  one  thing  necessary.  But  we  are  looking  for 


THE  VOICE 


17 


common  factors  now,  not  variants.  And  under 
the  canons  of  any  creed  whatever,  none  is  per¬ 
fectly  saved  unless  his  way  of  life  synchronizes 
with  the  majestic  harmonies  of  God.  He  must 
be  a  doer  of  the  law,  not  merely  a  believer.  Other¬ 
wise,  religion  would  have  nothing  whatever  to  do 
with  morals. 

Those  shepherds  of  Judea  who  looked  upon  the 
desert  stars  and  wove  their  dreams  into  the  faith 
of  our  Western  peoples  saw  clearly  the  shining 
way  across.  That  universe  of  God,  stretching 
into  infinity  beyond  them,  was  a  creation  of  beauty 
and  of  law.  The  silent  stars,  forever  swinging 
in  their  luminous  curves,  were  an  obedient  and 
ordered  part  of  a  plan.  Man’s  duty  in  that  plan 
was  to  bring  not  only  his  own  spirit  but  his  en¬ 
vironment  into  harmony  with  God’s  will.  That 
was  part  of  his  task  on  earth,  perhaps  his  whole 
task.  There  arose  among  the  children  of  Israel 
a  man  of  genius  named  Moses.  Whether  by  di¬ 
rect  revelation  or  by  that  process,  almost  as 
miraculous,  through  which  genius  leaps  from  star 
to  star,  he  laid  down  for  his  people  a  code  of 
action  so  all-embracing  and  yet  so  practical  that 
the  Ten  Commandments  with  changing  interpre¬ 
tations  to  fit  changing  times,  have  remained  for 
nearly  thirty  centuries  the  moral  guide  of  the 
Judean-born  religions.  Jesus  came  to  express 


1 


18  CHRIST  OR  MARS? 

them  all  and  to  widen  their  scope  in  his  final 
Commandment — 6 * that  ye  love  one  another.” 

Jesus  did  more.  After  all,  the  Hebrew  God 
was  a  tribal  conception.  Salvation  through  one¬ 
ness  with  His  infinite  goodness,  belonged  to  the 
Children  of  Israel  alone.  Dimly  here  and  there 
in  the  Old  Testament  we  glimpse  a  mind  groping 
through  the  mists  of  its  own  time  for  a  wider 
interpretation.  But  the  Jew,  if  he  thought  much 
about  the  future  at  all,  still  found  himself  bound 
by  the  tribal  habit  of  the  troglodyte.  His  vision 
was  limited;  beyond  the  Roman  Empire  to  the 
West  and  vaguely  understood  hordes  on  the 
steppes  and  mountains  to  the  East,  he  knew 
nothing  of  men.  The  civilizations  building  among 
the  reeds  of  the  Seine,  the  caves  of  the  Colorado, 
the  peaks  of  the  Andes;  the  great  expanses  of 
humanity  which  made  his  tiny  clan  so  insignificant 
— they  lay  two  thousand  years  beyond  his  educa¬ 
tion.  God  was  going  to  save  the  Hebrews,  and 
as  part  of  the  salvation  give  them  universal  em¬ 
pire.  Only  as  men  became  Jews  by  voluntary  act 
or  by  conquest  was  Heaven  opened  to  them.  But 
Jesus  proclaimed  his  gospel  “to  all  men.”  The 
Kingdom  of  Heaven  was  no  longer  tribal. 

Yet  the  Jew  had  dreamed  his  dream,  and 
dreamed  it  true.  When,  if  ever,  man  was  per¬ 
fected  in  God,  there  would  come  a  millennium,  an 


THE  VOICE 


19 


age  of  Heaven  on  earth.  This  perfected  world 
and  the  world  eternal  of  goodness  and  happiness 
would  lie  so  close  together  that  death  would  be 
but  the  “  portal  of  the  life  elysian.” 

So  it  is  with  the  perfect  believer,  even  in  this 
present  world  of  grievous  imperfections.  I  spoke 
once  with  a  chaplain  concerning  the  courage  of 
men  in  battle.  He  was  a  brave  man;  it  was, 
however,  the  fashion  in  the  Great  War  for  heroes 
to  admit  their  own  moments  of  cowardice.  “The 
only  absolutely  brave  men  I  know,”  he  said,  “are 
a  priest  and  a  captain  of  the  line.  Both  have 
highly  spiritual  natures  and  believe  their  faiths 
without  reservation.  To  them  death  is  just  step¬ 
ping  over  into  eternal  and  glorious  life.  The 
transition  may  be  a  little  disagreeable ;  but  what 
price  is  that  to  pay  for  an  eternity  of  rapture?” 

To  create  Heaven  on  earth,  so  that  this  life 
may  blend  into  the  glorious  next — tacitly  or  ex¬ 
plicitly  the  great  body  of  modern  religious  thought 
has  made  this  a  part  of  Christian  creed.  Christen¬ 
dom,  repeating  that  phrase  of  prayer  “thy  King¬ 
dom  come,”  daily  expresses  this  ideal.  The  world 
of  the  senses  may  be  a  vale  of  tears ;  nevertheless 
it  is  part  of  religious  duty  to  dry  the  sources  of 
those  tears.  Certain  of  the  older  sects  believe 
in  withdrawing  bodies  of  men  and  women  from 
the  world,  that  they  may  by  tending  their  own 


20  CHRIST  OR  MARS? 

inner  lights  present  to  God  as  an  offering  their 
own  perfected  souls.  But  even  such  creeds  do 
not  make  this  a  universal  rule ;  it  is  only  for  those 
“called”  to  the  religious  life. 

For  the  rest — Christianity  does  not  content 
itself,  and  never  did,  simply  with  perfecting  the 
individual  so  that  his  soul  may  he  strong  to  resist 
the  temptations  of  greed,  lust  and  hate.  Part  of 
its  “mission,”  its  workaday  business,  is  to  remove 
those  temptations.  In  San  Francisco  some  twenty 
years  ago,  lingered  a  most  unsavory  vice  district, 
a  rudiment  of  the  old  mining  camp,  called  St. 
Mary’s  Alley.  Opposite  its  entrance  stood  old 
St.  Mary’s  Church,  Catholic;  and  two  or  three 
blocks  up  California  Street,  Grace  Church,  Episco¬ 
pal.  What  did  those  churches  do  about  St. 
Mary’s  Alley?  Did  they  content  themselves  with 
making  the  souls  of  their  members  so  pure  as  to 
pass  it  by  unseen  ?  On  the  contrary,  they  brought 
hard,  unsentimental  political  pressure  to  bear; 
and  St.  Mary’s  Alley  has  become  a  park.  Here 
is  a  practical  example  of  the  larger  Christian 
spirit;  a  proof,  which  could  be  multiplied  a  mil¬ 
lion  times,  that  the  spirit  of  Jesus  in  action  con¬ 
cerns  itself  not  only  with  the  individual  soul  but 
with  a  comely  and  moral  environment — not  only 
with  “sin”  but  with  the  “occasion  of  sin.”  And 
as  the  world  has  become  more  and  more  great 


THE  VOICE 


21 


and  specialized  and  compressed,  these  occasions 
of  sin  have  retreated  farther  and  further  back 
into  the  complexities  of  the  body  politic.  Stealing, 
as  I  define  it,  is  acquiring  goods  contrary  to  the 
current  tribal  rules  for  the  protection  of  property. 
When  Moses  gave  the  Ten  Commandments,  a 
thief  stole  by  invading  his  neighbor’s  chicken  yard 
or  snatching  a  purse  on  the  road.  Nowadays,  a 
man  may  steal  as  wickedly  as  the  Judean  thief 
and  on  a  scale  undreamed  in  Judea,  by  sitting 
in  a  back  room  and  making  a  secret  agreement 
with  an  apparent  competitor.  As  the  scope  and 
vision  of  society  have  widened,  the  Church — a  little 
hesitatingly  and  reluctantly,  it  would  seem  to  the 
layman — has  been  obliged  ever  to  widen  its  con¬ 
cern  with  the  occasions  of  sin. 

So  here  we  have  certain  factors  common  to  all 
Christian  beliefs  and  modern  Judaism.  First, 
since  the  true  believer  tries  to  put  himself  into 
harmony  with  an  infinitely  just  God,  morality 
forms  an  integral  part  of  religion.  Second,  re¬ 
ligion  should  concern  itself  not  only  with  perfect¬ 
ing  the  individual  but  with  making  the  world  he 
lives  in  a  better  soil  for  moral  and  spiritual 
growth;  not  only  with  purifying  souls,  but  with 
creating  “The  Kingdom.”  Any  human  institu¬ 
tion  which,  taken  as  a  whole,  defeats  these  two 
objects,  sets  itself  up  as  an  enemy  to  religion. 


\ 


22  CHRIST  OR  MARS? 

Let  ns  then  look  at  war,  not  as  a  material  factor 
in  modern  society,  but  as  a  spiritual  factor.  If 
by  its  perpetuation  mankind  as  a  mass  “grows  in 
grace,’ 9  then  in  spite  of  devastated  fields,  ruined 
cities,  crippled  populations,  wrecked  economic  sys¬ 
tems,  war  is  good;  let  us  arm  for  the  Right.  If, 
however,  it  makes  as  a  whole  for  lower  morality, 
lesser  spiritual  growth  in  the  terms  on  which 
Jesus  defined  the  spirit,  then  war  is  the  soul 
enemy  of  the  Judean-born  religions.  To  put  it 
in  the  terms  of  the  stricter  sects,  is  Heaven  less 
populous,  Hell  more,  because  of  this  most  vene¬ 
rable  human  institution!  In  the  present  inquiry, 
little  else  matters. 


CHAPTER  in 


THE  THINGS  THAT  ARE  CAESAR’S 

The  primitive  Christian,  swimming  with  his 
little  burden  of  love  in  a  sea  of  hate  and  force, 
must  have  been  puzzled  at  times  to  reconcile  his 
new,  passionately  held  revelation  with  his  political 
conscience.  “  Render  unto  Caesar  the  things  that 
are  Caesar’s,”  Christ  said.  Faith,  hope,  charity; 
poverty,  chastity,  obedience;  clean  and  just  re¬ 
lations  with  his  immediate  neighbor — those  were 
God’s  things.  But  exactly  what  things  were 
Caesar’s!  For  example,  the  Emperor,  making 
war,  compelled  his  subjects  to  fight  for  him. 
Ancient  Judea  knew  only  too  well  the  face  of  war. 
In  battle,  a  man  kills  men.  That  may  be  justi¬ 
fiable;  but  along  with  its  physical  horrors  war 
trails  a  vivid  Hell  of  moral  dirt.  Judea  had  ex¬ 
perienced  the  corruption,  the  greed,  the  lust,  the 
murderous  impulses  which  fester  in  military 
camps;  the  carnivals  of  hate,  theft,  rape  and 
cowardly  slaughter  which  follow  the  capture  of  a 
town.  Yet  this  thing  was  Caesar’s.  Except  when 
Caesar  asked  for  renunciation  of  the  Faith,  it 


23 


I 


24  CHRIST  OR  MARS? 

was  the  Christian’s  duty  to  follow  him.  After 
all,  those  Hebrew  scriptures  on  which  the  min¬ 
istry  of  Christ  based  itself  had  sanctioned  war; 
after  all,  the  kings  and  prophets  of  Judea  had 
sometimes  commanded  God’s  people  to  slay  and 
spare  not.  As  men  and  institutions  tend  to  do 
in  perplexity,  the  bewildered  Church  gave  it  up 
and  accepted  things  as  they  were.  Ignoring  the 
“occasion  of  sin”  which  war  affords,  she  contented 
herself  with  putting  down  the  old  Adam  in  her 
individual  sons ;  so  that  when  they  went  to  battle, 
they  should  maintain  amidst  the  temptations  of 
war  souls  strong  through  grace. 

By  the  time  Constantine  saw  his  vision  in  the 
midst  of  battle  and  the  Roman  Empire  accepted 
Christianity,  the  compromise  between  Christian 
love  and  the  realities  of  war  seemed  complete. 
Now,  the  Faith  was  in  power;  but  the  Empire 
which  it  ruled  was  dying.  And  again  the  Church 
readjusted  its  views  on  war. 

Heathens  and  later  Moslems  threatened  it 
from  without,  Pagans  from  within.  Then  and 
for  many  centuries  afterward,  all  Christendom 
believed  in  a  literal,  fiery  Hell  for  sinners  and 
unbelievers,  a  Heaven  of  eternal  rapture  for 
the  Faithful.  It  were  better,  Churchmen  felt,  to 
endure  the  bitterness  of  war,  to  absorb  its 
hatreds  and  violence,  than  to  let  Christianity 


THE  THINGS  THAT  ARE  CAESAR’S  25 


perish,  and  condemn  friend  and  enemy  alike  to  an 
eternal  misery. 

Almost  as  completely  did  the  Church  yield  in 
the  matter  of  internal  wars  between  Christian 
princes.  As  time  went  on,  it  did  indeed  draw  a 
distinction  between  just  and  unjust  wars.  But 
what  was  a  just  war?  Manifestly,  in  most  cases 
one  litigant  to  a  dispute  has  the  balance  of  right 
on  his  side,  the  other  the  balance  of  wrong.  If 
this  were  not  so,  courts  of  law  would  be  a  fraud 
and  a  mockery.  Seldom  did  the  Church,  except 
when  its  own  integrity  was  involved,  take  sides 
against  any  belligerent  no  matter  how  brutal  or 
greedy  his  intention.  Tacitly  it  surrendered,  ruled 
that  this  habit  in  man  of  going  out  and  killing  in 
gangs  was  too  deeply  rooted  for  Christianity  to 
eradicate.  There  came  at  last  a  wise  Jew  to  face 
what  he  thought  to  be  truth,  to  give  a  philo¬ 
sophical  basis  for  this  surrender  to  Caesar.  The 
State,  said  Spinoza,  expanding  the  thought  of 
Maimonides,  has  no  morals.  What  is  wrong  for 
the  individual,  such  as  killing,  lying,  breaking 
solemn  pledges,  is  perfectly  right  for  the  State. 
Its  only  canon  of  ethics  is  its  own  welfare  and  con¬ 
venience.  Practically,  this  thought  had  been 
accepted  by  Christianity  long  before  a  Christian¬ 
ized  Jew  made  it  into  a  formula.  It  is  one  of  those 
comfortable  explanations  of  things  as  they  are  by 


I 


26  CHRIST  OR  MARS? 

which  the  reactionary  tries  to  resist  the  irre¬ 
sistible  flow  of  the  human  spirit. 

Long  before  this,  the  Church  and  the  other 
moral  forces  of  Western  Europe  had  built  a  pretty 
but  rather  flimsy  bridge  between  God  and  Caesar, 
and  called  it  chivalry.  Without  trying  to  reach 
the  roots  of  war,  to  deal  with  the  “occasion  of 
sin,”  Christianity  worked  on  the  individual.  It 
built  up  the  ideal  of  the  perfect  Christian  warrior 
who  was  to  smite  not  in  anger  but  in  justice.  He 
bore  his  arms  to  break  the  heathen  and  uphold  the 
Christ.  He  spared  his  conquered  foe.  He  resisted 
those  carnal  impulses  of  the  flesh  which  battle 
engenders  in  man.  Everywhere,  he  tempered  with 
mercy  the  justice  of  his  cause. 

This  ideal  was  conceived  by  the  aristocracy,  of 
the  aristocracy,  for  the  aristocracy.  While  we 
cannot  know  for  certain,  it  is  probable  that  the 
hordes  of  ignorant  minds  who  with  pike  and 
bill  followed  their  armored  masters  into  battle 
never  had  instruction  in  the  Christian  ethics  of 
war. 

However,  it  rose  as  high  as  its  times  permitted. 
Those  were  the  ages  of  snobbery.  One  who  reads 
his  Shakespeare  critically  will  find  that  even  the 
master  mind  of  the  English  race  never  conceived 
of  any  other  order  of  society.  And  this  attitude 
of  the  rank  and  file  mattered  little,  since  the 


THE  THINGS  THAT  ARE  CAESAR’S  27 


aristocracy  was  in  command,  gave  the  order  of 
battle. 

Let  ns  render  to  chivalry  its  due  meed.  Before 
that  ideal  came  into  the  world,  battle  and  mas¬ 
sacre  had  been  almost  synonymous.  The  victors 
pursued  the  retreating  army  and  6  i  slew  and 
spared  not”  save  perhaps  to  carry  away  captives 
as  slaves.  If  it  suited  their  convenience  or  whim, 
they  ravished  whole  provinces,  leaving  the  in¬ 
habitants  to  starve  in  the  ruins.  Chivalry  estab¬ 
lished  the  rule— often  broken,  as  often  observed 
— that  the  warrior  should  kill  and  destroy  no  more 
than  was  necessary  to  insure  victory.  Perhaps 
this  code  broke  down  most  often  in  wars  where  the 
churches  were  directly  involved.  The  Crusaders 
sacked  Jerusalem  and  massacred  its  inhabitants ; 
while  Saladin  the  Moslem,  when  he  retook  the 
town,  put  Christendom  to  blush  by  his  moderation. 
The  Thirty  Years’  War,  stirred  up  by  religious 
hatreds,  made  Germany  a  desert.  This,  however, 
is  scarcely  a  paradox.  In  these  wars  the  Church, 
itself  a  belligerent,  was  swept  into  the  cauldron 
of  hatreds.  The  instances  merely  prove  what 
European  men  were  capable  of  doing  once  they 
lost  their  chief  instrument  of  moral  balance. 

And  in  the  seventeenth  or  eighteenth  centuries, 
after  Cervantes  “laughed  chivalry  to  death,”  it 
achieved  its  greatest  triumph.  Christian  in  spirit, 


28 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


it  engendered  the  code  of  civilized  warfare  where¬ 
by  every  soldier  tacitly  pledged  himself  to  make 
warfare  as  merciful  as  possible.  Aristocratic  in 
organization,  it  created  a  small,  exclusive  military 
caste,  reenforced  by  a  few  bayonets  from  the 
dregs  of  the  population.  To  this  caste  was 
designated  the  task  of  fighting  wars.  In  the 
period  between  about  1650  and  about  1790  war¬ 
fare  bore  with  unprecedented  lightness  upon  hu¬ 
man  life.  Probably  the  French  casualties  in  battle 
during  all  the  famous  wars  of  Louis  XIV  totaled 
less  than  those  of  the  single  Twentieth  Corps  of 
Paris  in  the  World  War.  And  those  hundred  and 
fifty  years  were  precisely  the  period  when 
England,  France,  Germany,  Austria  and  Italy 
were  laying  the  foundations  for  that  amazing 
structure  of  human  creation  which  Christendom 
built  in  the  nineteenth  and  twentieth  centuries. 

Indeed,  one  may  argue  speculatively  that  the 
late  material  progress  of  the  white  race,  its  sud¬ 
den  leadership  in  the  modern  world,  is  due  to  that 
same  check  on  the  raw  impulses  of  the  warrior. 
Let  us  take  by  contrast  Islam.  Perhaps  the  low¬ 
est  of  the  great  religions  in  its  ideals,  it  has  still 
best  kept  the  original  faith.  In  its  attitude 
toward  women  and  marriage  it  is  less  exalted  than 
Christianity;  but  that  is  balanced,  some  would 
say,  by  its  views  on  alcohol.  When  Islam  keeps 


THE  THINGS  THAT  ARE  CAESAR’S  29 


the  faith,  its  worst  enemy  would  scarcely  deny 
that  it  is  a  fairly  good  instrument  for  an  orderly 
society.  Islam  ran  its  course  from  birth  to 
decadence  in  five  or  six  centuries.  At  its  height 
it  was  a  civilization  of  learning,  culture,  compara¬ 
tive  enlightenment.  Damascus  of  the  Eighth  Cen¬ 
tury  made  the  best  city  of  Europe  appear  a  huddle 
of  barbarians.  But  whereas  Christianity  deplored 
war,  at  worst  merely  compromised  with  it,  Islam 
exalted  war.  To  fight  for  the  Faith — in  the  end 
the  Faith  meant  only  your  special  sect — stood  as 
a  supreme  duty  to  every  Moslem.  Death  in  battle 
was  the  sure  opening  to  an  eternity  of  spiritual 
and  sensual  delight.  To  kill  the  unbeliever  was 
a  holy  duty.  I  have  mentioned  the  gallantry  of 
Saladin  at  the  capture  of  Jerusalem.  However, 
he  was  presumably  a  bright  exception.  Most 
battles  of  the  ‘ ‘ Moslem  hordes”  ended  in  indis¬ 
criminate  massacres,  whether  the  enemy  were 
Heathen,  Christian,  or  only  another  Moslem  sect. 
The  flowers  of  Islam  such  as  scholarship,  poetry, 
dawning  research,  suddenly  and  mysteriously 
withered.  Why?  Probably  because  her  best 
young  men  were  generation  after  generation  going 
forth  to  die  in  battle  and  open  the  gates  of  Para¬ 
dise,  leaving  the  weaker  and  less  able  to  transmit 
their  poorer  blood.  This,  I  believe,  mainly  ac¬ 
counts  for  the  eclipse  of  Islam,  its  degeneracy 


30 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 

from  the  brightness  of  medieval  Damascus  or 
Cordoba  to  the  setness  and  squalor  of  modern 
Constantinople. 

In  that  period  of  gathering  racial  strength  be¬ 
tween  the  end  of  the  Thirty  Years’  War  and  the 
Napoleonic  wars,  which  from  the  standpoint  of 
the  race  amounted  almost  to  a  truce,  men  of  the 
Christian  races  drew  a  new  line  of  definition  be¬ 
tween  the  things  which  belong  to  the  Church,  as 
the  expression  of  God  in  action,  and  the  things 
which  belong  to  the  practical  side  of  man.  Exact 
inquiry  concerning  the  nature  of  our  environment 
seemed  no  longer  impious ;  perhaps,  even  Church¬ 
men  began  to  reason.  God  knew  what  he  was 
doing  when  He  endowed  us  with  this  curious, 
active,  soaring  human  intellect.  We  set  ourselves 
to  discover  the  world  as  it  really  is,  not  as  hazy, 
biased  interpretations  of  Revelation  might  lead  us 
to  think  that  it  is.  We  discovered  the  main  laws 
which  govern  the  Universe.  We  bored  further 
and  further  into  the  nature  of  things  animate  and 
inanimate.  We  harnessed  the  flame  and  the  light¬ 
ning  and  made  them  helpers  in  our  work,  until 
any  pair  of  human  hands  multiplied  its  produc¬ 
tivity  a  thousand  fold.  We  learned  how  to  send 
our  thoughts  round  the  world  in  the  twinkling 
of  an  eye. 

In  the  world  of  the  spirit,  the  age  of  Romance 


THE  THINGS  THAT  ARE  CAESAR’S  31 


— at  least  the  old  romance — definitely  passed; 
there  followed  an  age  of  realism  and  realists. 
This  formed  a  poor  soil  for  chivalry,  which  was 
half  compounded  of  poetic  illusion.  Cervantes 
had  stabbed  it  to  the  heart ;  but  the  institution  was 
two  centuries  in  dying.  Even  then  its  pale  ghost 
lingered  in  the  code  of  civilized  warfare,  drawn 
never  so  strictly  or  with  such  careful  regard  for 
the  Christian  amenities  as  in  the  age  which  was  to 
prove  it  a  dead  letter. 

But  we  did  not  perceive,  as  yet,  the  passing  of 
chivalry.  We  only  knew,  as  the  productive  nine- 
teenth  century  gave  way  to  the  tragic  twentieth, 
that  the  nations  of  Christendom  had  become  one 
great  armed  camp,  that  the  diplomacies  of  Chris¬ 
tendom  concerned  themselves  not  as  formerly 
with  false  or  true  points  of  honor,  but  solely  with 
extending  territory  and  commercial  privileges.  If 
we  except  Russia,  democracy,  which  is  the  spirit 
of  Christianity  in  politics,  had  become  all  but  uni¬ 
versal;  and  with  one  paradoxical,  unexpected  re¬ 
sult.  No  longer  did  the  aristocrat  enjoy  spiritual 
and  material  privileges  on  the  tacit  understand¬ 
ing  that  his  was  the  sole  responsibility  for  na¬ 
tional  defense.  That  responsibility  belonged  now 
to  all  citizens.  Into  the  crowded  nations  of 
Europe  had  come  Conscription.  Every  healthy 
male  citizen  was  trained  in  arms,  was  ready,  when 


1 


32  CHRIST  OR  MARS? 

the  time  should  come,  to  participate  in  “the  na¬ 
tional  defense  ” — which  must  be,  on  one  side  or 
the  other,  synonymous  with  “the  national  attack.’ ’ 
Modern  scientific  improvement  was  transforming, 
although  slowly,  the  equipment  of  war.  We  real¬ 
ized  that ;  though  in  our  worst  nightmares  we  did 
not  realize  what  this  would  mean  before  many 
years. 

Yet  we  solaced  ourselves  with  the  bright  side 
of  the  picture.  Men,  individually,  were  growing 
better.  Perhaps  they  took  their  Christianity  less 
literally  than  in  past  ages;  but  they  adhered,  in 
their  ways  of  life,  more  closely  to  its  spirit.  In 
every  age  men  of  good  will  had  heard  the  Voice; 
from  the  faithful  St.  Francis  singing  of  his 
brotherhood  with  all  men,  to  the  agnostic  Rous¬ 
seau  declaring  that  war  is  folly  but  cannot  be 
remedied  because  men  are  incurable  fools.  Agnos¬ 
tic  or  Christian,  however,  these  were  at  one  with 
Rousseau  in  their  despair  of  a  remedy.  Now,  how¬ 
ever,  the  new  intellectual  daring  of  the  age  in¬ 
spired  these  pacifists.  They  searched  down  to  the 
causes  of  war,  found  it  a  disease  of  man’s  nature 
which  might  be  cured.  From  his  voluntary  servi¬ 
tude  to  the  soil,  Tolstoi  spoke  his  burning  con¬ 
victions.  Pacifism  evolved  from  the  passive  stage 
to  the  active.  Whole  nations  seemed  to  be  laying 
hold  on  these  principles.  By  1910  France  was 


THE  THINGS  THAT  ARE  CAESAR’S  33 


teaching  in  her  public  schools  the  dreadful  un¬ 
necessity  of  quarrels  between  nations.  Spite  of 
what  we  saw  about  us,  we  wondered  if  war  really 
belonged  in  the  structure  of  modern  life.  A  cal¬ 
culation  of  finances  against  costs  seemed  to  prove 
that  no  nation  could  sustain  a  campaign  lasting 
more  than  six  months. 

Germany  crossed  the  French  border.  The  war 
thus  begun  lasted  four  years  and  a  quarter.  It 
involved,  save  for  a  few  small  kingdoms,  all 
Europe,  a  third  of  Africa,  the  more  populous  and 
advanced  half  of  the  two  Americas,  passively  at 
least  two-tliirds  of  Asia,  all  of  Australasia.  It 
cost  forty  million  lives.  It  destroyed  the  best  male 
breeding  stock  of  all  the  great  European  nations. 
It  condemned  two  generations  to  the  degradations 
which  go  with  modern  poverty. 

These  are  mainly  material  effects.  Its  most 
palpable  effect  on  the  spiritual  side  was  to  lay 
forever  the  pale,  ineffectual  ghost  of  chivalry. 
That  code  of  civilized  warfare  which  the  Church 
had  been  fifteen  centuries  building  disappeared 
like  tissue  paper  In  a  furnace.  Within  a  week, 
Germans  were  dropping  bombs  on  the  civilians  of 
defenseless  towns,  and  shooting  civilian  hostages. 
Within  a  month,  England  was  preparing  to  starve 
out  the  women  and  children  of  Germany.  When 
the  war  ended,  scarcely  an  article  of  the  Code  but 


34 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


had  been  habitually,  systematically  violated  for 
four  years.  That  pretty,  dainty  structure  by 
which  the  Church  had  bridged  the  gap  between 
Christianity  and  war  was  forever  fallen. 

Men  of  good  will  looked  at  his  wreckage  and 
for  the  first  time  beheld  chivalry  and  the  things 
grown  from  the  spirit  of  chivalry  exactly  as  they 
are.  It  was  even  less  than  a  compromise;  vir¬ 
tually,  the  servants  of  Christ  had  yielded  to  Mars 
all  that  Mars  needed.  4  ‘  Do  not  harm  women  and 
children;  protect  them  and  succor  them,  whether 
they  be  friend  or  foe,”  chivalry  had  said;  and 
Mars  had  gracefully  acquiesced.  Why  was  Mars, 
with  this  elaborate  and  somewhat  theatrical  ges¬ 
ture  of  mercy,  accepting  such  a  limitation  on  his 
privileges?  Just  because  women  and  children 
were  weak,  and  could  not  harm  him.  On  them, 
therefore,  the  Christian  warrior  might  indulge  his 
pretty  mercies.  As  things  stood  then,  it  would 
not  make  a  particle  of  difference. 

But  this  was  now  a  world  of  machinery,  which 
is  the  heritage  of  past  strengths  put  at  service  of 
the  weak.  And  machinery  was  coming  with 
dazzling  speed  into  the  processes  of  war.  A  child 
with  a  broadax  in  his  hand  is  66 amazing  weak.” 
A  child  with  the  lanyard  of  a  loaded  cannon  in 
his  hand  is  marvelously  strong.  Only  a  little  less 
effective  is  the  child  or  the  young  woman  pulling 


THE  THINGS  THAT  ARE  CAESAR’S  35 


light  levers  or  loading  cartridges  in  a  munition 
factory.  And  finally,  Mars  saw  that  war  no  longer 
concerned  armies  alone ;  he  saw  that  every  human 
being  capable  of  doing  any  work  whatever  serves 
the  uses  of  a  nation  in  war.  The  very  babies 
might  grow  up  to  be  fighters  or  workers.  Where¬ 
fore,  the  bombs  began  to  rain  their  tearing  ex¬ 
plosives  or  their  choking  gases  upon  munition 
factories  and  open  cities ;  and  none  who  sent  forth 
the  bombers  asked  how  many  women  and  children 
would  that  night  perish.  And  they  did  perish  by 
thousands,  as  in  any  future  war  they  will  perish 
by  millions. 

In  another  and  less  obvious  way,  the  Christian 
spirit,  as  exemplified  by  chivalry,  had  greatly 
hampered  the  ultimate  intentions  of  Mars.  In 
material  human  affairs,  destruction  is  always 
easier  than  construction.  It  takes  ages  to  build 
a  city ;  a  conflagration  may  destroy  it  in  a  night. 
Such  being  the  case,  men  have  wondered  at  times 
why  for  three  or  four  centuries  progress  in  de¬ 
vices  for  killing  men  has  dragged  so  far  behind 
progress  in  devices  for  production  and  distribu¬ 
tion  of  wealth.  The  best  tool  they  had  for  this 
purpose,  up  to  the  World  War,  was  violent  ex¬ 
plosion  of  a  chemical  compound;  a  thing  known 
and  used  in  its  present  form  at  least  four  cen¬ 
turies  ago.  “The  conservative  nature  of  soldiers’ ’ 


36 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


was  held  to  account  for  that ;  which  is  not  the  real 
explanation,  I  think.  The  Christian  soldier  was 
trying  to  live,  as  best  he  might,  by  the  spirit  of 
chivalry.  He  knew  the  butcheries  of  war  as  well 
as  its  glories.  He  preferred,  by  a  kind  of  tacit 
agreement  among  warriors  of  all  nations,  to  limit 
its  harms  and  horrors.  A  half-legendary  story  to 
which  recent  research  has  given  some  foundation, 
relates  that  during  the  Crimean  War  an  eminent 
British  soldier  invented  some  cheap  and  ex¬ 
peditious  new  method  of  killing  on  an  enormous 
scale.  His  confreres  of  the  War  Office  inspected 
his  invention  and  then  filed  it  away  among 
their  secret  archives.  4  4  Its  deadliness  staggers 
humanity, ”  they  said.  “We  cannot  be  responsible 
for  introducing  such  an  instrument.  ”  This  story 
may  be  false ;  but  its  spirit  rings  true.  It  exem¬ 
plifies  perfectly  the  attitude  of  your  old-time 
soldier.  A  fine,  upstanding,  veteran  British 
Colonel  of  the  professional  army,  speaking  to  me 
at  the  Front,  had  his  say  about  civilians  and  their 
influence  on  war.  “They’ve  spoiled  this  game,” 
he  said.  “  We  understood  it,  and  we’d  made  it 
relatively  harmless.  But  they’ve  come  along  with 
their  inventions  and  devices — forced  on  us,  sir — 
and  made  the  business  a  universal  Hell.” 

We  used  to  shudder  before  1914  at  stories  of 
ancient  warriors  who  impounded  their  enemies 


THE  THINGS  THAT  ARE  CAESAR’S  37 


and  burned  them  to  death.  By  the  middle  of  the 
war,  we  were  scorching  our  enemies,  regularly 
and  scientifically,  with  liquid  flame. 

Poison  had  always  been  considered  a  sneaking, 
loathly  way  of  killing,  sternly  barred  by  the  pro¬ 
fessional  soldier.  But  poison  gas  became  toward 
the  end  of  the  World  War  an  instrument  of 
slaughter  only  a  little  less  useful  than  high  ex¬ 
plosive.  Toward  the  end,  we  had  invented  our 
Lewisite  gas,  the  mist  of  which,  settling  even  in 
minute  quantities  on  the  skin,  will  produce  cer¬ 
tain  and  painful  death  within  twelve  hours.  By 
this  instrument,  it  will  be  possible  in  a  night  to 
kill  the  inhabitants  of  whole  cities.  As  the  war 
closed,  both  the  Central  Powers  and  the  Allies 
were  studying  closely  the  possibilities  in  warfare 
by  bacilli.  That  study,  together  with  advanced 
research  in  wholesale  killing  by  electricity  and  in¬ 
visible  rays,  has  gone  on  steadily  since  the  Armis¬ 
tice.  Mars  no  longer  admits  any  check  on  his 
gory  purposes.  From  his  throne  of  skulls,  he 
laughs  at  Christ. 

Yes,  the  work  of  organized  Christianity  to  miti¬ 
gate  war,  after  ages  of  partial  success,  has  proved 
a  complete,  final  failure.  What  is  the  Church  to 
do?  Revive  the  old  method?  Try  again  to  limit 
by  the  dead  formulas  of  chivalry  or  by  flimsy 


38 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


agreement  the  horrors  and  deadliness  of  modern 
war  ?  Certain  diplomats,  stronger  for  once  in  the 
heart  than  in  the  head,  are  trying  that  even  now ; 
bnt  they  who  understand  modern  war  only  langh 
at  the  pitiful  ineffectiveness  of  such  proceedings. 
War  is  a  game  without  a  referee.  When  your 
opponent  hits  below  the  belt  your  only  recourse, 
if  you  would  win  or  even  exist,  is  to  hit  an  inch 
lower.  Poison  gas  has  been  imagined  before  the 
Great  War;  it  was  specifically  barred  by  every 
code  we  had.  On  April  22,  1915,  the  Germans 
loosed  their  first  poison  gas  attack.  Did  the 
Allies  content  themselves  with  protesting?  On 
the  contrary,  their  chemists  were  at  work  next 
day  devising  deadlier  gases.  The  government 
which,  whatever  its  intention,  entered  a  war  with¬ 
out  every  known  device  for  killing  “in  case  of 
emergency”  would  discredit  itself  with  its  citi¬ 
zens.  The  moment  comes  when  the  enemy,  per¬ 
haps  in  despair  of  victory,  hits  below  the  belt, 
uses  some  device  outlawed  by  the  existing  code. 
The  government  which  nobly  refused  to  rise  to 
the  emergency  and  reply  in  kind  would  probably 
be  torn  to  pieces  by  its  own  supporters. 

No,  we  cannot  recreate  chivalry.  It  began  dying 
in  1605  when  Cervantes  the  soldier  published  his 
wise  romance  of  Don  Quixote ;  it  gave  its  last  gasp 
at  Ypres,  when  the  Germans  opened  their  gas 


THE  THINGS  THAT  ARE  CAESAR'S  39 


attack.  Its  very  corpse  is  rotted  now;  all  the 
powers  of  magic  cannot  make  it  live  again.  It 
was  a  strange  hybrid,  half  Christian  mercy  and 
half  moonshine.  And  this  is  the  age  of  realities, 
when  men  of  all  nations,  races  and  intellectual 
castes  have  less  and  less  patience  with  pretty 
illusions.  But  whoever,  inside  the  Church  or  out, 
holds  himself  a  member  of  Christ’s  Kingdom, 
knows  that  we  must  create  something  more  effec¬ 
tive  to  take  its  place.  Else  Christendom  is 
threatened  as  never  before;  and  not,  this  time, 
by  Pagan  torture  chambers  or  Saracen  swords, 
but  by  the  foe  from  within. 

Here  is  a  task  for  the  Church — a  task  and  a 
test.  That  Garden  of  the  Lord,  that  visible  mani¬ 
festation  of  God  on  earth,  that  shining  picture  of 
the  Kingdom  which  holds  the  eyes  of  every  Chris¬ 
tian  with  any  vision  larger  than  the  salvation  of 
his  own  particular  soul,  stands  in  grave  danger. 
The  Church  cannot  meet  the  emergency  simply  by 
special  work  with  the  individual,  trying  to  make 
all  men  and  women  perfect.  That  method  is  im¬ 
portant— I  grant  you,  theologians,  it  is  most 
important  of  all.  But  the  experience  of  nineteen 
centuries  proves  that  it  is  not  enough.  What¬ 
ever  separate  paths  the  individual  sects  of  Chris¬ 
tianity  may  choose  toward  Heaven,  on  this  one 
point  it  must  sink  its  differences.  It  is  strong 


40 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


now;  it  is  not  depleted  by  sectarian  wars  nor  is 
it  forced,  as  in  the  days  of  its  puny  infancy,  to 
compromise  or  perish.  United  on  a  purpose,  it 
can  do  what  it  wills  with  the  spirit  of  man.  It 
must  reach  past  the  mere  individual  toward  the 
machinery  of  modern  life.  With  the  courage  born 
of  the  right  and  the  truth,  it  must  study  material 
and  human  things  as  they  are,  not  as  some  pre¬ 
conceived  notion  of  philosophy  holds  that  they 
may  be.  It  must  determine  the  causes  of  war, 
and  having  found  them  set  about  to  eliminate 
them  from  the  human  heart  and  from  human  so¬ 
ciety. 

Else,  the  Church  will  not  only  have  compro¬ 
mised  this  time ;  she  will  have  surrendered.  Con¬ 
demned  in  her  own  conscience,  she  will  be  sinking 
into  mere  soft  emotional  satisfaction  and  hollow 
outward  observance.  Her  meetings  and  revivals, 
her  dawn  communions  and  High  Masses,  her  pul¬ 
pits  and  vestments,  her  consoling  ministrations 
and  relieving  charities,  will  not  avail  to  save  the 
Lord’s  Garden  in  the  day  of  wrath  which  she  has 
done  nothing  to  avert. 


CHAPTER  IV 


THE  HYMN  OF  HATE 

The  first  and  most  obvious  evil  of  modern  war 
from  the  viewpoint  of  the  moralist,  I  have  set 
forth  in  the  last  three  chapters.  It  hampers,  it 
fetters,  it  destroys  that  concerted  effort  to  bring 
the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  on  earth,  which  is  the 
chief  higher  aim  of  organized  Christianity — “Thy 
Kingdom  come.”  Few,  I  think,  will  dispute  this. 
However,  this  special  evil  might  be  tolerated  if 
the  harm  were  balanced  by  some  special  moral 
good.  If  battle  were  a  means  of  grace;  if  the 
unlucky  warriors  died  and  the  lucky  survived  with 
souls  more  subtly  attuned  to  the  infinite ;  if  finally 
they  left,  because  of  their  heroism,  a  higher 
spiritual  atmosphere,  then  Christian  morals  might 
continue  to  tolerate  war.  The  sincere  militarist, 
whenever  he  happens  also  to  be  a  Christian,  be¬ 
lieves  that  war  does  confer  all  these  benefits,  and 
is  therefore  a  spiritual  gain  to  our  race. 

His  candid  opponent  must  admit  that  this  posi¬ 
tion  was  once  fairly  sound.  And  here  exactly  lies 
the  most  perplexing  point  in  the  morals  of  war. 

41 


42 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


The  average  man,  called  out  to  fight  for  his  coun¬ 
try,  seems  to  himself  to  he  imitating  that  supreme 
act  of  sacrifice  by  which  Christ  crowned  and  com¬ 
pleted  his  ministry.  Once,  it  was  more  than  seem¬ 
ing.  When  he  went  voluntarily  though  reluc¬ 
tantly,  when  he  was  not  pressed  into  service  by 
the  power  of  some  overlord  or  drawn  into  the 
ranks  by  some  primitive  desire  of  loot  or 
slaughter,  he  made  a  supreme,  unselfish  sacrifice 
beyond  which  man  cannot  go.  Else  all  our  ceno¬ 
taphs  to  the  soldier  dead,  our  memorial  poems, 
our  heroic  ballads,  were  mockeries. 

Often  I  try  to  throw  myself  into  the  mental 
state  of  a  boy-warrior  in  the  age  before  man  be¬ 
gan  to  know  his  world;  and  somehow  it  is  the 
little,  remote,  provincial  English  town  of  Strat- 
ford-on-Avon,  in  the  days  when  Shakespeare  was 
young,  which  frames  the  picture  for  me.  The 
boy  of  sixteenth-century  Stratford,  even  when  the 
Grammar  School  had  taught  him  how  to  read, 
had  a  narrow  intellectual  horizon.  The  confines 
of  County  Warwick  bounded  his  vision.  Even 
London  was  but  a  vague  place  of  imagined  glories 
where  dwelt  that  Queen  who  divided  with  God  his 
loyalties.  The  peoples  lying  beyond — they  were 
only  a  vague,  twisted  concept.  Of  Frenchman  or 
Spaniard  or  Dutchman,  he  had  heard  little,  and 
that  little  only  the  worst.  His  merrie  England, 


THE  HYMN  OF  HATE 


43 


his  beloved  England  and  most  of  all  that  little 
England  which  rolled  in  green  lawns  over  the 
Warwickshire  hills — that  was  the  only  world  he 
knew.  Now,  the  Queen  had  spoken.  England  was 
at  war.  This  serene,  green  land  was  threatened. 
He,  or  the  corresponding  lad  of  Tours  or  Burgos 
or  Maestricht,  had  no  means  of  knowing  that  this 
war  might  have  been  declared  in  the  beginning 
because  his  own  country  wanted  another  country’s 
lands  or  because  two  princes  had  quarreled  over  a 
mistress.  All  he  knew  was  that  his  sovereign 
called;  and  if  he  did  not  respond  valiantly, 
the  green,  pleasant  vales  of  Warwickshire  or 
Touraine  or  Holland  might  be  green  and  pleasant 
no  more.  With  a  regretful  look  at  the  life  he 
might  be  leaving,  he  shouldered  his  pike  and  went 
out  to  give  his  all.  He  had  no  doubt  but  that  this 
heroic  act  was  also  absolutely  right.  It  was  a  fine 
thing— -the  finest  he  knew. 

Only,  as  education  became  universal,  as  the 
newspaper  with  its  mechanical  servant  the  electrio 
telegraph  made  it  possible  for  all  instantly  to 
know  what  was  happening  in  any  quarter  of  the 
globe,  as  the  growth  of  democracy  forced  the  boy 
of  Warwickshire  to  interest  himself  in  public 
affairs  instead  of  leaving  them  to  the  Squire  and 
the  Lord,  as  the  world  shrank  until  Petrograd 
and  Constantinople  of  the  Twentieth  Century 


44 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


were  nearer  to  Stratford  than  London  of  the  Six¬ 
teenth,  some  of  the  fineness  began  to  rub  away. 
It  became  possible  for  the  Warwickshire  lad  to 
understand  that  the  average  Frenchman  or  Ger¬ 
man  or  Italian  was  also  an  average  human  being 
much  like  himself.  Also,  the  inquiring  spirit  of 
the  age  had  enabled  men  of  larger  view  to  delve 
further  and  further  down  toward  the  causes  and 
reasons  of  war.  They  found  the  main  root  of  the 
trouble,  more  often  than  not,  to  be  economic  in 
its  nature.  Even  when  a  King  fought  to  insure 
the  succession  of  his  own  house  to  a  throne,  he 
was  usually  fighting  not  wholly  for  glory  and 
power  but  also  to  fatten  the  purses  and  increase 
the  properties  of  his  chief  retainers.  That  also 
began  to  be  popular  knowledge.  Whereat  the 
militarist,  who  is  essentially  a  blind  worshiper  of 
things  as  they  used  to  be,  found  a  new  philosoph¬ 
ical  dogma  to  fit  his  purposes. 

Nations  are  entities,  like  human  beings.  Na¬ 
tions  have  always  struggled  against  nations, 
as  individuals  against  individuals;  and  the  basis 
of  the  conflict  is  economic.  There  must  arise 
now  and  then  an  u  irreconcilable  economic  con¬ 
flict’  ’  where  one  party  or  the  other  must  yield 
or  die.  Then  we  have  war.  It  cannot  be  avoided. 
It  will  come  every  so  often,  and  it  is  meet  and 
right  that  it  should.  Through  war,  the  fittest 


THE  HYMN  OF  HATE 


45 


survive,  the  weakest  go  to  the  wall.  It  is  natural, 
even  consecrated. 

The  shallow  biological  analogy  involved  in  the 
militaristic  phrase  “ survival  of  the  fittest”  was 
long  ago  discredited  by  Science.  But  that  is  aside 
from  the  mark.  The  point  here  is  that  men,  un¬ 
assisted  by  propaganda,  no  longer  had  a  firm, 
undivided  viewT  of  the  sanctity  involved  in  dying 
for  one’s  country.  Reason  began  to  play  its  light 
into  the  dark  corners  of  their  minds ;  or,  to  phrase 
it  as  do  the  militarists,  “  their  patriotism  was 
weakened,  they  grew  soft  through  too  much 
peace.”  From  first  to  last  of  the  Great  War,  a 
thousand  soldiers  of  all  nations,  if  one,  asked  me 
what  it  was  all  about,  anyhow?  And  this,  mind, 
was  not  a  straight  inquiry  of  one  who  wants  to 
know,  but  a  rhetorical  question,  plainly  put  by 
way  of  eliciting  the  answer  “nothing!”  That 
old,  unquestioning  valor  to  which  death  in  battle 
for  one’s  country  seemed  a  sacrament,  an  act  of 
supreme  consecration,  was  passing  away. 

Wherefore  the  lords  of  Europe’s  destiny  in  the 
Nineteenth  Century  devised  another  and  less 
noble  stimulus  for  the  flagging  morale  of  peoples. 
In  place  of  narrow  consecration,  they  managed  to 
substitute  hate,  pure  hate.  The  printing  press 
was  the  agency  by  which  mankind  was  growing  a 
little  international,  a  little  disposed  to  question 


46 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


the  validity  of  exclusive  patriotism.  They  took 
this  agency,  perverted  it  from  its  natural  pur¬ 
poses,  made  it  serve  their  ends.  The  process  was 
not  difficult.  The  universal  fascination  of  gossip 
proves  that  the  malevolent  is  so  much  more  in¬ 
teresting  than  the  benevolent!  In  the  spiritual 
realm  as  in  the  material,  it  is  easier  to  destroy 
than  to  create ;  it  is  easier  to  rewake  the  slumber¬ 
ing  barbarian  in  civilized  man  than  to  lead  him  to 
higher  levels  of  thought  and  action.  However  the 
better  and  more  natural  influence  of  the  printed 
word  on  international  politics — to  make  men 
understand  that  they  may  forgive — was  never 
entirely  overcome ;  and  in  all  literature  and 
journalism  of  the  Nineteenth  Century  one  traces 
this  dual  tendency,  these  conflicting  currents. 

What  chancelleries  and  general  staffs  accom¬ 
plished  in  the  way  of  inducing  artificial  hate 
appeals  to  the  detached  observer  as  divinely 
ridiculous ;  to  laugh  at  it  in  the  proper  spirit  one 
would  need  the  humor  and  the  pity  of  a  god.  Take 
England  for  example — sober,  balanced  old  Eng¬ 
land,  with  her  cold,  hard  vision  on  practical 
things,  her  shyly  hidden  streak  of  sentiment,  her 
easy,  tolerant  ways.  In  the  eighties  of  the  last 
century,  the  British  Army  fought  a  small  Colonial 
war  with  a  nation  of  sturdy  Dutch  settlers  in 
South  Africa.  The  settlers  were  marvelous 


THE  HYMN  OF  HATE 


47 


fighters  in  their  own  country;  the  British  found 
the  job  too  difficult  for  the  expected  rewards,  and 
gave  it  up.  The  First  Boer  War  stirred  up  in 
Britain  little  interest  and  almost  no  hate.  But 
some  of  the  Lords  of  England  remembered ;  if  we 
are  to  believe  the  gossip  of  Wilfred  Scawin  Blunt, 
the  old  Queen  named  another  Boer  War  as  one 
of  the  things  she  wanted  to  see  accomplished  be¬ 
fore  she  died.  Also,  Cape  Colony  was  spreading 
Northward  and  the  Boers  had  begun  to  discover 
unsuspected  natural  resources  in  their  soil. 
Wherefore,  Cecil  Bhodes  and  other  Empire- 
Builders  desired  those  lands.  On  their  side  the 
Boer  settlers  developed  a  hard-headed  Dutch  prej¬ 
udice  against  foreigners  of  all  kinds,  and  chose 
to  hold  back  development  of  the  country.  There 
was  the  unescapable  economic  conflict ;  wherefore, 
the  Queen  had  her  wTish.  Now  the  native  English¬ 
man  who  had  heard  of  the  Boers  at  all  thought 
about  them  as  rather  rough  specimens  who  shot 
and  rode  remarkably  well  and  had  rather  quaint 
ways.  He  knew  also  that  they  practiced  the  Prot¬ 
estant  religion  and  came  of  northern  European 
stock,  like  himself.  Yet  within  a  month  after  the 
war  began,  England  was  hating  the  Boers  with 
violent  unreason.  “The  nearest  analogy  that 
white  civilization  presents  to  the  ignorant  and 
obstinate  tribes  of  colored  barbarians.” — “A 


48 


CHRIST  OR  MARS  ? 


horde  of  the  most  miserable  scoundrels  nature  has 

produced” -  “A  savage,  and  as  a  savage  he 

should  be  treated.”  I  cull  these  gems,  as  char¬ 
acteristic,  from  the  periodical  literature  of  the 
time.  And  the  British  believed  this,  both  in  their 
minds  and  in  their  emotions.  The  war  ended  with 
the  absorption  of  the  settlers  into  British  South 
Africa,  and  who  now  in  England  hates  a  Boer? 

At  about  the  beginning  of  this  century,  Russia 
showed  a  perilously  intent  interest  in  Great 
Britian’s  Indian  Empire  and  “spheres  of  in¬ 
fluence”  throughout  the  Near  East.  Suddenly, 
the  pens  of  England  began  to  write  down  Russia 
and  the  Russians.  Rudyard  Kipling,  marvelous 
artist  who  thinks  only  from  the  eyes  out,  wrote 
his  “Bear  that  looks  like  a  man.”  The  man  in 
the  street  began  gently  to  gnash  his  teeth.  The 
war  cloud  was  dissipated;  the  gnashing  stopped 
before  it  grew  really  violent.  A  few  years  later, 
Russia  entered  the  Triple  Entente  and  fought  in 
the  Great  War  beside  Britain.  Whereat,  the 
British  press  capered  with  delight  at  the  thought 
of  the  simple,  good-hearted  Russian  peasant  with 
his  fierce  loyalties  to  his  Czar;  and  the  populace 
of  London  cheered  Russians  on  the  streets. 
Russia  abandoned  the  war,  went  Bolshevik.  In 
the  days  after  the  Armistice,  there  seemed  some 
danger  of  the  British  workman  following  his 


THE  HYMN  OF  HATE 


49 


example.  ‘Within  a  few  months,  the  middle-class 
Englishman  was  again  hating  Russians  with 
violence  and  sincerity. 

As  for  the  shifting  British  emotions  toward 
Germany — hut  here  let  me  bring  the  example 
closer  to  home.  Before  1914,  we  Americans  of 
the  old  Colonial  blood  well  knew  the  German 
among  us.  On  the  whole,  perhaps  we  esteemed  him 
best  of  the  more  recent  immigrants.  We  had  found 
him  honest,  orderly,  a  good  neighbor.  Here  and 
there  the  Prohibition  element  quarreled  with  his 
hereditary  love  for  beer;  here  and  there  it  was 
noted,  rather  in  amusement  than  in  criticism,  that 
he  kept  some  of  his  old  national  customs — like 
sangerfests  and  turnvereins — rather  longer  than 
most  classes  of  immigrants.  Americans  who  had 
gone  abroad  to  study  usually  noted  with  dis¬ 
approval  the  growth  of  militarism  and  force- 
thought  in  Germany,  but  they  balanced  that  with 
sturdy  virtues  which  they  found  among  their  com¬ 
rades  of  German  classes  or  seminars. 

I  believe  this  a  very  fair  statement  of  Ameri¬ 
can  feeling  toward  Germany  and  Germans  before 
1914.  And  that  balanced  judgment,  that  refusal 
to  condemn,  generally  persisted  until  the  Ger¬ 
man  militaristic  system  threatened  to  conquer 
Europe  and  set  it  back  to  the  Middle  Ages,  until 
a  mad  and  overconfident  group  of  reactionaries 


50 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


ordered  American  shipping  to  leave  the  Seven 
Seas. 

We  declared  war.  Six  months  later,  no  slander 
against  Germans  as  a  class  was  too  nasty  for  ns 
to  swallow.  “I  have  been  asked  how  we  should 
treat  an  individual  German  who  was  a  friend  be¬ 
fore  the  war,”  wrote  an  American  author  not  un¬ 
know  to  fame.  “I  can  answer  without  hesitation. 
Cut  him  out  from  your  acquaintance.  Withdraw 
your  business  from  him.  And  do  not  fail  to  let 
him  know  how  you  feel.”  We  even  denied  them 
eminence  in  the  arts ;  heard  with  satisfaction  that 
Goethe  was  overrated,  Schiller  a  tin-pan  poet, 
Wagner  a  degenerate.  I  am  not  sure  but  this  was 
the  meanest-spirited  among  all  our  mad  per¬ 
formances.  We  applauded  to  the  echo  speakers 
who  described  how  the  German  army  cut  off  the 
hands  of  Belgian  children.  Most  Americans 
affected  at  least  to  believe  that  no  German — no, 
not  one — was  anything  but  a  treacherous,  lecher¬ 
ous  brute.  Perhaps  I  need  no  further  expand  this 
description  of  American  war  thought.  Nearly 
every  reader  can  multiply  examples  from  his  own 
heart.  I  can,  certainly.  .  .  . 

Then  five  years  of  a  peace  which  is  not  peace; 
and  none  of  us,  save  for  a  few  fanatics,  un¬ 
balanced  persons,  or  professional  patriots,  be¬ 
lieves  the  extreme  slanders  against  Germany. 


THE  HYMN  OF  HATE 


51 


Our  army  stayed  four  years  on  the  Bhine,  and 
got  on  well  with  the  inhabitants.  We  began,  as  a 
people,  to  grow  a  little  sorry  for  the  individual 
German.  Yet  that  individual  German  to  whom 
we  granted  pleasant  tolerance  in  1913,  whom  we 
hated  with  bitter  loathing  in  1918,  whom  we  pitied 
and  rather  wanted  to  help  in  1923 — he  is  exactly 
the  same  man. 

Nor  is  the  sketch  of  hate  thought  in  Germany 
any  less  divinely  ridiculous.  I  was  in  Belgium 
during  the  invasion  of  August,  1914.  The  Ger¬ 
man  army,  as  it  marched,  gnashed  its  teeth  at 
Bussia.  They  were  out — so  the  simple  German 
soldier  told  me — on  a  holy  crusade  against  the 
barbarous,  dangerous  Slav.  ‘ 4  Tell  me,  you  Amer¬ 
icans,  why  are  the  English  fighting  us?”  they 
would  ask  in  sorrow  and  perplexity  rather  than 
in  anger.  As  for  the  French — one  rather  dis¬ 
liked  to  go  against  the  French — poor  dupes  of 
Bussia!  They  were  good  fellows,  and  valiant 
fighters.  One  hoped  that  when  the  victorious 
armies  of  the  Kaiser  took  Paris,  the  inhabitants 
would  be  friendly. 

In  that  one  month,  I  saw  a  change  come  over 
the  whole  spirit  of  the  Germany  army.  The  divi¬ 
sions  of  the  Kaiser  had  tried  out  the  Bussian  on 
the  Eastern  front*  and  found  them  wanting.  But 
the  British  navy  had  lived  up  to  expectations.  It 


52 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


had  made  good  the  blockade,  which,  the  far¬ 
sighted  heads  of  German  military  affairs  saw, 
was  yet  to  be  the  most  effective  weapon  of  the 
enemy.  The  little  British  army,  holding  its 
valiant  identity  from  Mons  back  to  Paris,  had 
given  promise  of  what  Britain  might  do  on  land. 
The  word  went  out  to  the  press,  to  the  hate 
orators,  to  the  officers  in  charge  of  morale  at  the 
front:  “Regard  England  as  the  supreme 

enemy !”  A  week  more,  and  it  became  dangerous 
to  talk  English  within  hearing  of  the  German 
army.  Six  months  more,  and  the  line  of  the 
Hymn  of  Hate, 

We  have  one  hate  and  one  alone — England - 

seemed  to  become  the  essence  of  German  political 
emotion.  A  little  lacking  in  the  delicacies  of 
hnmor,  the  Germans  harped  on  this  theme  with 
variations  which  made  good  ammunition  for 
Punch .  I  found  in  Switzerland  one  German  who 
always  repeated  “Gott  strafe  England!”  while  he 
was  brushing  his  teeth,  the  act  serving  as  a 
memorandum  for  his  daily  ritual.  Press  and  pub¬ 
lic,  professional  hate-orators  and  paid  propa¬ 
gandist,  all  turned  their  batteries  on  the  British. 
France  still  figured  as  a  deluded  appanage  to 
England,  whom  one  fought  as  a  tricked  fool 
rather  than  as  a  dangerous  enemy. 


THE  HYMN  OF  HATE 


53 


The  war  ended;  the  Peace  of  Versailles  was 
drawn.  Before  a  year  had  passed,  circumstances 
made  France  “the  enemy”;  she  it  was,  the  Ger¬ 
mans  believed  who  had  insisted  on  an  inordinate 
bill  of  reparations,  she  it  was  who  held  over  Ger¬ 
many  the  military  power  which  would  enforce 
collection.  Suddenly,  the  venom  of  Germany  was 
switched — officially — from  the  British  wire  to  the 
French  wire.  By  1922,  even  Admiral  von  Tirpitz, 
once  leader  in  the  chorus  against  perjured 
Britain,  announced  that  Germany  must  now  love 
England  and  turn  her  just,  righteous  hatred 
against  the  real  enemy,  France.  Long  before  that, 
circumstances  and  propaganda  had  done  their 
work  with  the  populace.  In  the  spring  of  1920, 
less  than  a  year  and  a  half  after  the  Armistice,  I 
tried  to  reach  Stuttgart  to  interview  the  German 
government  which  had  fled  from  the  Kapp  putsch 
in  Berlin.  Few  trains  were  running;  I  made  the 
last  stage  of  the  journey  standing  up  in  a  fifth 
class  car  wedged  tight  into  a  sardine  can  of 
humanity.  The  conductor  discovered  that  I  had 
made  a  mistake  in  buying  my  ticket.  Now  my 
German  is  less  than  rudimentary,  but  I  found 
that  he  spoke  French.  In  that  language,  we 
straightened  out  this  somewhat  complicated  mat¬ 
ter.  We  were  interrupted  by  the  sinister,  tigerish 
mob  roar  which  a  crowd  makes  when  it  is  work- 


54 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


ing  up  toward  trouble.  At  the  sound  of  spoken 
French,  these  Germans  had  begun  to  mill  like 
cattle ;  I  was  bombarded  with  insults  whose  mean¬ 
ing  I  read  from  the  tone  rather  than  the  words. 
A  curious  stubbornness,  mixed  perhaps  with  a 
loyalty  to  France,  prevented  me  from  declaring 
myself ;  I  merely  glared  back.  But  the  conductor 
spoke  for  me. 

“This  man  is  not  French/ ’  said  he.  “His  lan¬ 
guage  is  English.”  Instantly  the  faces  about  me 
began  to  relax  their  tension.  “He  is  an  Amer¬ 
ican!”  “  Ach — Amerikcmisher!”  sounded  from 
all  corners  of  the  car.  And  voices  began  to  ask 
in  broken  English  for  news  of  brothers-in-law  in 
Chicago  or  cousins  in  Cincinnati.  Yet,  had  I 
spoken  English  in  that  same  crowd  two  years  be¬ 
fore,  I  should  have  been  marked  for  slaughter! 

On  the  same  journey,  I  met  in  a  railway  com¬ 
partment  a  cultivated  German  woman,  a  function¬ 
ary  of  the  new  Republican  government.  Her 
mouth  was  filled  with  the  atrocity  of  France. 
Stunted  children  with  waxy  circles  under  their 
eyes  stood  about  the  railroad  platforms;  many 
of  them  were  crying.  That  crying  of  children  ran 
through  all  street  noises  in  Germany  during  the 
distressful  year  of  1920 — the  poor  little  eyases 
were  hungry.  She  waved  her  hand  at  one  such 
crowd.  “That  is  what  France  has  done!”  she 


THE  HYMN  OF  HATE 


55 


jerked  out,  “ starved  our  children!  Can  we  for¬ 
get  ?  ’ 9 

‘‘But,  madam,”  I  interposed — more  to  get  her 
answer  than  by  way  of  argument — “it  was  not 
the  French  who  caused  the  hunger  of  Germany. 
It  was  the  British  blockade.  ” 

“Yes,”  she  replied,  “but  the  British  were  only 
the  cat’s  paw  of  France.  They  will  understand 
some  day  how  they  were  deceived !  France  is  our 
natural  enemy.” 

“Would  you  have  said  that  two  years  ago?”  I 
inquired. 

She  paused  a  moment  as  though  to  find  some 
reason  to  justify  her  emotion. 

“True,  but  we  have  found  France  out  since 
then!”  she  replied  finally. 

Now  I  mention  these  personal  adventures  only 
by  way  of  illustrating  the  greater  from  the  less# 
In  those  days  such  was  the  German  mood,  which 
the  events  of  the  succeeding  two  years  were  to 
intensify.  Yet  the  Englishman  of  1910  whom  the 
average  German  saw  merely  as  a  rather  too  active 
rival,  the  Englishman  of  1916  whom  he  classed 
with  pirates,  bandits  and  devils,  the  Englishman 
of  1922  whom  he  had  begun  to  regard  as  a  some¬ 
what  benevolent  protector,  was  exactly  the  same 
man.  So  was  the  Frenchman  of  1913  whom  he 
looked  lightly  down  upon  as  a  frivolous  but  at- 


56 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


tractive  person,  the  Frenchman  of  1916  whom  he 
pitied  as  a  valiant  dupe,  and  the  Frenchman  of 
1922  whom  he  pictured,  through  the  lurid  mists 
of  his  own  sulphurous  hate,  as  a  grasping, 
murderous  Shylock.  Reason  laughs  at  these 
facile  changes  in  psychology ;  but  reason  does  not 
enter  into  the  equation.  These  mental  heats  are 
partly  natural  to  the  old  Adam  in  man,  and  partly 
artificial;  partly  engendered  by  the  blind  desire 
of  revenge  that  follows  after  nation  or  army  has 
“seen  its  dead,”  and  partly  stirred  up  by  war 
propaganda.  The  intelligent  propagandist  under¬ 
stands  that  his  true  objecture  is  to  drive  the  issue 
from  the  field  of  reason  into  that  of  the  emotions. 
This  accomplished,  there  remains  nothing  to  be 
done.  Against  all  dictates  of  their  higher  intel¬ 
ligence,  all  hints  from  their  sense  of  humor,  the 
people  whose  minds  he  has  corrupted  will  hate 
and  hate  and  keep  on  hating  until  he  turns  off  the 
current  or  switches  it  to  another  wire. 

As  in  one  mood  I  review  my  memories  of  the 
World  War,  it  seems  to  me  like  a  great  epidemic 
of  mental  disease,  whose  chief  symptom  was 
the  gnashing  of  teeth.  Irvin  Cobb,  with  his  quick, 
discriminating  eye,  noted  in  the  first  month  that, 
though  many  Europeans  laughed,  no  one  ever 
seemed  to  smile.  In  repose,  all  countenances  were 
strained;  even  young  faces  showed  lines.  That 


THE  HYMN  OF  HATE 


57 


strain  deepened  rather  than  lifted  in  the  ensuing 
four  years,  until  the  prevailing  expression  some¬ 
what  resembled  that  of  insanitv.  And  indeed  is 
not  hatred  akin  to  madness?  Going  to  the  Front 
became  in  time  a  relief.  For  there  men  were  too 
busy  with  the  physical  manifestations  of  hate  to 
spare  time  and  energy  for  its  emotional  mani¬ 
festations. 

How  repellant  and  yet  how  supremely  ridicu¬ 
lous  seem  now  the  expressions  of  hatred  which 
were  to  us  then  the  daily  food  of  the  mind !  The 
Germans  were  rough,  to  put  the  matter  with  all 
Christian  mildness,  in  their  passage  through  Bel¬ 
gium.  There  were  German  atrocities;  however, 
I  prefer  to  call  them  now,  nine  years  from  the 
event,  militaristic  atrocities.  The  German  Gen¬ 
eral  Staff  had  issued  orders  designed  to  cow  the 
Belgians,  to  render  them  spiritually  incapable  of 
resistance.  The  German  army,  under  iron  dis¬ 
cipline,  obeyed  those  orders.  Here  and  there,  of 
course,  were  sporadic  episodes  of  violence  or  out¬ 
rage.  You  cannot  mobilize  a  million  and  a  half 
men  without  including  some  natural  thugs  and 
born  degenerates  whose  tendencies  will  come  out 
in  the  red  mists  of  war.  Here  and  there,  as  at 
Gerbevillers  in  France,  a  militarist,  drunken  with 
his  poison  theory  and  French  wine,  exceeded  his 
orders  and  made  of  occupation  a  massacre.  It 


58 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


remains  to  be  shown,  however,  whether  any  army 
or  any  nation  similarly  well  grounded  in  the  phi¬ 
losophy  of  militarism,  similarly  well  disciplined, 
would  have  behaved  any  better  in  the  circum¬ 
stances. 

In  the  third  week  of  the  war,  a  hysterical 
American  woman  staggered  into  the  headquarters 
of  the  American  tourists  at  the  Savoy  Hotel, 
London.  She  had  escaped  from  Belgium.  And 
at  a  Belgian  railway  station  she  had  seen  twenty 
boy  scouts  with  their  hands  cut  off.  The  Ger<< 
mans  had  done  it,  in  order  that  these  children 
might  never  bear  arms  against  Germany.  I  laugh 
now  when  I  remember  that  I  swallowed  this  yarn 
whole.  So  did  many  another  responsible  Amer¬ 
ican.  And  quite  possibly  this  was  the  origin  of 
our  favorite  hate  story  on  the  Allied  side  of  the 
border.  I,  being  a  journalist  and  accustomed  to 
draw  the  line  between  fact  and  rumor,  began  to 
doubt  this  charge,  which  the  populace  was  soon 
whispering  in  a  hundred  forms,  which  the  more 
violent  newspapers  were  printing  daily — but  with¬ 
out  details  and  without  photographs.  During  the 
four  remaining  years  of  the  war,  I  conducted  a 
steady  search  for  Belgian  children  with  their 
hands  cut  off.  Of  course  I  never  found  a  case, 
though  sometimes  the  trail  seemed  to  grow  hot. 
For  example,  an  Englishman  to  whom  I  imparted 


THE  HYMN  OF  HATE 


59 


my  indiscreet  doubts  roared  at  me  that  two  Bel¬ 
gian  refugee  children  whose  hands  had  been  cut 
off  by  the  Germans  lived  next  door  to  his  sister 
in  St.  John’s  Wood,  London.  I  got  the  address, 
to  which  I  repaired  at  once  by  taxicab — and  found 
two  Belgian  children  with  four  sturdy  and  intact 
little  hands.  Beentering  Belgium  in  1919  I  mem» 
tioned  this  rumor  to  a  people  who  certainly  did 
not  love  Germans;  and  they  only  laughed.  lYet 
the  populace  of  the  unoccupied  countries  believed 
it  with  passionate  intensity.  When  one  denied 
or  doubted  it,  their  rage  of  unreasonable  con¬ 
tradiction  betrayed  their  mood.  They  liked  to  be¬ 
lieve.  This  instance  of  German  barbarity  con¬ 
firmed  their  hate— their  dear,  black  hate. 

In  an  article  about  the  German  invasion  of  Bel¬ 
gium,  I  remarked  on  a  feature  of  war  which  I 
had  never  imagined — the  smell,  akin  to  that  of  a 
menagerie,  hanging  in  the  trail  of  an  army.  Not 
long  afterward,  I  received  a  letter  from  a  French 
professor,  a  man  of  first  rank  in  his  scientific 
specialty,  asking  further  information  on  that 
point.  He  was  writing  a  monograph  on  the  Ger¬ 
man  race,  to  jjrove  by  incontrovertible  facts  that 
Germans  “were  not  exactly  human.”  They  came 
from  a  different  evolutionary  stock  from  the  rest 

•r 

of  our  species;  He  had  noted,  and  so  had  other 
Frenchmen,  that  Germans  exhaled  a  smell  dif- 


60 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


ferent  from  that  of  homo  sapiens ,  the  true  man. 
My  exact  observation  on  that  point,  he  said,  would 
furnish  him  valuable  data. 

Midcourse  of  the  war,  an  American  friend  gave 
me  a  copy  of  a  most  pathetic  letter  written  by  a 
German  woman  to  her  brother  in  America  and 
somehow  smuggled  across  the  border.  This  thing 
must  not  happen  again,  she  said.  The  German 
people  must  rise  and  overthrow  the  system  which 
caused  it.  For  herself,  she  had  sent  nine  sons  to 
the  war.  Six  were  dead.  If  the  war  could  only 
spare  Fritz,  the  youngest,  her  baby!  Should 
Fritz  die  too,  she  could  not  survive.  Of  course, 
the  first  part  of  the  letter  forecast  exactly  what 
happened  afterward  in  Germany.  To  cheer  their 
drooping  spirits,  I  read  this  letter  to  a  group  of 
French,  English  and  American  friends  in  Paris. 
I  looked  up  from  my  reading.  The  eyes  of  the 
American  woman  who  sat  nearest  me  were  sharp 
and  hard.  “I  hope  Fritz  is  dead  by  now!”  she 
jerked  out. 

Concerning  the  follies  of  hatred  on  the  other 
side  of  the  line,  I  hesitate  to  write  lest  I  myself 
be  accused  of  a  lingering  hate  complex.  I  instance 
but  two  episodes,  one  from  my  own  experience, 
the  other  on  unimpeachable  testimony.  Deported 
from  Belgium  at  the  end  of  August,  1914, 1  passed 
the  first  night  at  Maestricht  in  neutral  Holland. 


THE  HYMN  OF  HATE 


61 


I  found  a  group  of  Germans  in  the  hotel.  With 
wild  eyes  and  hushed  voices  they  told  me  about 
the  dreadful  things  done  to  the  German  colony  in 
Brussels  by  the  native  Belgians.  As  soon  as  war 
was  declared,  the  throat  of  every  German  man 
was  cut.  But  the  women,  they  said,  were  saved 
for  a  more  dreadful  fate.  After  having  their 
wicked  way  with  them,  the  Belgians  cut  off  their 
breasts !  When  the  rescuing  German  army 
arrived  in  Brussels,  the  German  residents  were 
all  dead. 

Now  it  happened  that  I  had  come  fresh  from 
Brussels,  where  I  had  been  listening  to  the 
troubles  of  Brand  Whitlock,  our  Minister  to  Bel¬ 
gium.  Until  the  Germans  came,  he  was  German 
charge  d’affaires .  Belgium,  being  a  neutral 
nation  which  had  thought  little  about  war,  did  not 
at  first  show  the  proper  hatred  against  Germany; 
when  the  Kaiser’s  army  overran  her  border  she 
was  merely  stunned  and  heart-broken.  But  the 
hate  clouds  began  to  gather.  Two  or  three  days 
later,  mobs  were  smashing  the  windows  of  Ger¬ 
man  shops.  Whitlock  conferred  with  the  author¬ 
ities.  The  police  went  forth,  gathered  up  all  the 
Germans,  encamped  them  under  guard  in  the  rail¬ 
road  yards.  The  army  issued  them  rations  and 
the  Bed  Cross  brought  milk  for  the  babies.  One 
or  two  German  men,  before  the  police  arrived, 


62 


CHRIST  OR  MRAS? 


were  somewhat  beaten  up.  These  were  the  sole 
casualties.  I  had  found  both  Mr.  Whitlock  and 
Burgomaster  Max  justly  proud  of  the  moderation 
shown  by  Brussels.  But  they  got  no  credit  in 
Germany!  To  the  end  of  the  war,  that  story 
about  the  women’s  breasts  remained  with  the 
Germans  as  popular  as,  with  us,  did  the  one  about 
children’s  hands. 

During  that  venture  into  Belgium,  I  saw  the 
first  British  prisoners  taken  by  the  German  army. 
Three  years  later,  I  met  many  of  the  same  men 
in  Switzerland,  where  they  had  been  exchanged 
as  invalids.  If  any  one  above  ground  is  to  be 
trusted  in  a  friendly  statement  of  fact,  it  is  an 
officer  of  the  old,  professional  British  army. 
They  spoke,  with  a  moderation  quite  lacking  in 
the  tone  of  the  Allied  press,  concerning  their 
treatment  in  German  prison  camps.  After  the 
Germans  got  things  in  hand,  they  said,  prison 
life  went  about  as  well  as  any  one  could  expect. 
But  their  most  vivid  memory  of  the  three  years 
between  battle  and  freedom  was  that  horrible  trip 
into  Germany,  when  the  populace  crowded  to  the 
windows  of  their  train  to  spit  on  them.  “I  was 
wounded,”  said  one  of  them,  “and  nearly  mad  of 
fever  thirst.  After  two  days,  my  pride  gave  way, 
and  I  began  to  beg  a  drink  from  the  women  in 
Red  Cross  uniforms  at  the  station  platforms. 


THE  HYMN  OF  HATE 


63 


They  would  deliberately  give  water  and  hot  coffee 
to  the  German  wounded,  and  then  pour  out  the 
leavings  on  the  station  platform,  and  laugh  in  my 
face.  I’d  been  in  Germany  only  three  months  be¬ 
fore  the  war  began.  Then,  every  one  was  not 
only  courteous,  but  friendly.” 

Perhaps  I  need  no  longer  multiply  instances. 
Hate  is  a  necessity  of  modern  war,  it  seems. 
Without  “righteous  hatred”  armies  will  not 
fight,  nor  civilians  endure,  to  the  last  ditch.  In 
more  primitive  times,  when  unreasoned  super¬ 
stition  played  so  large  a  part  in  human  affairs, 
artificial  stimulus  of  hatred  was  not  especially 
necessary.  The  ignorant  populace  automatically 
hated  the  enemy  because  he  had  a  different  com¬ 
plexion  and  a  different  smell,  worshiped  different 
gods,  wore  trousers  instead  of  a  tunic,  cut  his 
beard  round  instead  <5f  square,  spoke  a  different 
language.  The  aristocracy — well,  fighting  was 
their  business;  they  liked  it.  But  with  literate 
populations  of  self-governing  citizens,  the  case  is 
different.  Men  have  begun  to  know  the  worlds 
beyond  their  borders.  Is  your  enemy  Germany? 
The  average  man  has  been  brought  up  on  Grimm’s 
Fairy  Tales,  has  read  in  translation  Goethe  and 
Schiller,  is  informed  on  German  work  with  hous¬ 
ing  and  sanitation,  or  knows  the  accomplishments 
of  German  science. 


64 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


He  cannot  at  once  regard  every  individual  Ger¬ 
man  as  a  barbarian  dripping  with  the  gore  of 
women  and  children.  It  is  necessary  to  raise  up 
in  him  blind,  red  emotion  so  that  his  higher  brain 
cells  will  cease  to  function.  The  proceeding  is 
not  essentially  unlike  the  war  dances  by  which 
certain  savages,  before  rushing  to  battle,  lash 
themselves  into  a  state  of  blind  fury.  By  the 
time  the  work  is  done  and  the  populace  is  ready 
“to  stand  firm,”  thought  has  been  burned  up  in 
the  fires  of  emotion.  The  nation  is  in  the  mental 
condition  of  a  mob;  and  Le  Bon  has  laid  down 
the  rule  that  when  mob  mind  rules  a  crowd,  the 
collective  impulse  is  lower  than  the  lowest  impulse 
in  any  of  its  units. 

For  some  reason  never  entirely  clear  to  me, 
this  mob  spirit  takes  hold  most  strongly  on  the 
civilians.  Perhaps  that  is  because  they  cannot 
translate  their  thoughts  into  action.  Neverthe¬ 
less,  all  armies  engaged  in  the  late  war  trained 
their  soldiers  in  hate  as  well  as  in  arms.  “Psy¬ 
chological  preparation”  became  a  cardinal  prin¬ 
ciple  of  training.  Y.  M.  C.  A.  workers  and  emi¬ 
nent  citizens  addressing  the  soldiers  in  their  can¬ 
teens,  drill  sergeants  instructing  them  in  bayonet 
practice,  laid  upon  them  the  command  of  hate. 
These  sulphurous  fires  burned  up  the  last  vestige 
of  that  which  was  once  chivalry.  “France,  my 


THE  HYMN  OF  HATE 


65 


sweet  enemy’ ’  sang  England’s  soldier  poet.  How 
ill  would  this  romanticist  have  fitted  into  the 
.World  War!  In  his  place  stands  such  as  that 
militaristic  professional  soldier  who  once,  to  a 
Board  of  Morale  on  which  I  served,  brought  com¬ 
plaints  against  the  chaplains.  ‘  ‘  They  must  be  put 
under  stricter  control,”  he  said.  “They’re  not 
good  for  the  men.  Too  many  soft,  Sunday-school 
ideas.  I  suspect  that  a  lot  of  them  are  pacifists 
at  heart.  Some  of  them  even  idealists!” 

Surely,  in  its  compromise  between  Christ  and 
Mars,  Christianity  never  made  terms  with  hatred 
- — tearing,  murderous  hatred  against  unknown 
and  unseen  individuals.  In  all  systems  of  Chris¬ 
tian  morals,  hate  figures  as  the  little  brother  of 
murder.  The  Boman  Catholic  Church,  preparing 
its  communicants  for  confession,  specifically 
classifies  desire  for  revenge  and  cherishing  an  un¬ 
forgiving  spirit  as  violations  of  the  Fourth  Com¬ 
mandment;  and  Protestantism  holds  much  the 
same  attitude.  That  “righteous  wrath”  of  which 
we  hear  so  much  in  war  is  a  mere  phrase.  It  is 
perhaps  possible  for  a  man  of  exceptionally  high, 
noble  moral  quality  to  loathe  simply  in  a  spirit 
of  right  and  justice  such  a  system  as  that  of  the 
old  German  Imperial  government,  and  to  kill  the 
individual  German  in  a  spirit  of  love,  as  one 


66 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


tenderly  chloroforms  a  crippled  pet  dog.  It  may 
be  possible — but  it  didn’t  happen. 

If  the  soldier  was  by  nature  generous,  kind, 
forgiving  of  offense,  we  set  about  to  change  him. 
Bayonet  practice,  the  jabbing  of  a  dummy  Ger¬ 
man  in  vital  points  of  the  enemy,  was  a  most  effec¬ 
tive  piece  of  “psychological  preparation,”  the 
sergeants  in  charge  of  this  game  invented  a  kind 
of  hymn  of  hate,  a  familiar  combination  of  Amer¬ 
ican  oaths  chanted  to  the  swing  of  the  rifle.  It 
went  like  this:  “God”  (present  point)  “damn” 
(swing  back)  “you!”  (thrust).  The  hysterical, 
romantic  literature  of  the  war  pictured  men  as 
they  died  in  action  calling  on  God’s  mercy  or  their 
mothers  or  crying  with  the  last  breath  “vive  La 
France!”  How  many,  I  wonder,  died  with  the 
sergeant’s  Hymn  of  Hate  upon  their  lips? 

Let  us  try  to  strike  a  balance.  On  one  side  is 
the  sacrifice  of  war;  the  boy  who  wishes  to  live 
and  yet  goes  out  to  death  for  the  highest  thing 
he  knows.  None  with  a  human  heart  in  his  breast 
will  deny  the  beauty  of  his  sacrifice.  Those  un¬ 
known  soldiers  of  the  Allied  nations  are  symbols 
of  a  noble  thing.  Yet  as  war  improves  in  effi¬ 
ciency,  grows  further  and  further  away  from  the 
spirit  of  chivalry,  and  as  the  common  man  widens 
his  intellectual  horizon,  the  validity  of  his  sacri¬ 
fice  decreases.  In  the  late  war,  whole  nations  such 


THE  HYMN  OF  HATE 


67 


as  France  and  Germany  had  before  1914  applied 
the  principle  of  universal  conscription.  Not  one 
French  or  German  soldier  in  a  thousand  had  any 
alternative  but  to  fight  for  his  country — except 
the  disagreeable  one  of  dying  disgracefully  be¬ 
fore  a  firing  squad.  Nor,  with  the  intelligent 
volunteer,  was  the  act  quite  so  fine  and  high  as 
with  the  volunteer  of  three  centuries  ago.  The 
man  of  the  Twentieth  Century  knows  too  much 
to  make  the  perfect  military  hero.  Though  his 
country  need  defending,  he  cannot,  until  Boards 
of  Morale  and  agents  of  national  propaganda 
hove  done  their  work  with  him,  achieve  perfect 
confidence  that  his  side  is  exclusively  and  etern¬ 
ally  right  and  that  the  enemy,  whoever  he  may  be, 
is  an  enemy  of  God  and  all  mankind. 

Still,  in  places  where  the  British  have  imper¬ 
fect  control,  Hindu  widows  practice  suttee — burn 
themselves  alive  on  the  funeral  pyres  of  their 
husbands.  The  Hindu  woman  who  performs  this 
act  voluntarily  though  reluctantly  also  does  the 
highest  thing  she  knows.  Suicide  because  her 
husband  dies  is  not  the  highest  thing  to  a  Christian 
English  woman.  It  is  not  even  heroic  in  her;  it 
is  considered  by  the  moralists  a  case  of  quitting, 
by  the  theologians  a  cardinal  sin.  As  we  approach 
perfect  understanding,  as  link  by  link  the  truth 
strikes  off  the  fetters  of  superstition  and  out- 


68 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


worn  usage,  we  revise  our  moral  values.  We  are 
in  process  of  such  a  revision  in  relation  to  war. 
Giving  one’s  life  for  his  country  will  constantly 
become  less  and  less  commendable;  living  one’s 
life  for  his  country  more  and  more  heroic. 

And  as  the  gold  of  moral  grandeur  evaporates 
from  one  tray  of  the  scale,  the  dross  of  hate, 
malice  and  all  uncharitableness  piles  up  on  the 
other.  How  they  balance,  God  alone  knows;  He 
alone  can  weigh  such  values.  But  the  moral  gain 
ended  on  the  day  of  the  Armistice;  while  the 
hatred  lives  and  breeds  its  own  sinister,  mis¬ 
shapen  kind.  The  evil  that  is  war  lives  after  it, 
the  good  is  oft  interred  with  its  bones. 


CHAPTER  V 


KEEPING  THE  POISON  ACTIVE 

Lingering  hatred  against  an  enemy,  especially 
a  victorious  one,  has  marked  the  aftermath  of 
all  wars.  Germany  defeated  France  in  1870,  and 
tore  the  unwilling  Alsace-Lorraine  from  the  land 
of  their  allegiance.  The  French,  in  the  decade 
that  followed,  hated  Germany  with  a  bitterness 
almost  insane.  We  Americans  of  the  older  gen¬ 
eration  remember  the  mood  of  the  South  after  the 
Civil  War.  Yet  both  these  historic  hatreds,  lack¬ 
ing  fuel,  were  dying  within  ten  years ;  were  within 
a  generation  for  all  practical  purposes  already 
dead.  France  was  gradually  letting  Alsace- 
Lorraine  fade  into  the  vast  background  of  old 
historic  wrongs.  Although  certain  zealots  made 
their  annual  pilgrimage  to  the  Strasbourg  Monu¬ 
ment  in  Paris,  although  the  younger  officers  of 
St.  Cyr  still  gnashed  their  teeth,  not  one  French¬ 
man  in  twenty  would  have  gone  to  war  to  recover 
the  lost  provinces.  In  1906,  fifteen  thousand 
French  schoolmasters  demanded  of  the  govern¬ 
ment  that  they  be  allowed  to  teach  in  the  Public 


69 


70 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


Schools  the  follies  of  war,  the  blessings  of  peace. 
The  government  granted  this  boon.  In  its  article 
headed  “  Peace,  ”  the  Encyclopaedia  Britannica, 
edition  of  1910,  described  France  as  the  pacifist 
nation  of  Europe.  A  people  in  such  a  mood  is  not 
making  hatred  a  governing  motive  in  life.  As 
for  the  South,  the  collapse  of  her  economic  life 
and  the  injustices  of  “ reconstruction’ 9  somewhat 
prolonged  her  period  of  bitterness;  yet  within 
fifteen  or  twenty  years  it  had  simmered  down  to 
a  little  meaningless  talk.  By  the  beginning  of  this 
century,  South  and  North  were  working  together, 
governing  together. 

For  in  those  inefficient  days  of  hit  and  miss 
methods,  the  reactionary  elements  in  our  civiliza¬ 
tion  had  not  learned  the  uses  to  militaristic  plans 
of  cultivated  hate.  It  is  going  to  be  different  from 
now  on.  The  guns  of  Armageddon  were  scarcely 
stilled  before  ten  thousand  trained  propagandists 
set  themselves  to  perpetuate  for  political  con¬ 
venience  the  resentments  and  follies  of  the  late 
war.  A  controlled  popular  press  reiterated  the 
old  slanders  against  the  enemy,  invented  new  lies, 
dressed  up  half  truths. 

It  serves  the  convenience  of  the  present  govern¬ 
ment  m  France  to  make  the  people  believe  that  all 
Germany  is  gathering  herself  for  a  new  spring. 
So,  in  an  era  when  the  French  people  are 


KEEPING  THE  POISON  ACTIVE 


71 


naturally  very  tired  of  war,  the  militarists  may 
nevertheless  keep  alive  the  war  spirit.  When 
the  Armistice  was  declared,  the  experts  of  the 
Allied  forces  did  a  pretty  thorough  job  in  dis¬ 
arming  Germany.  It  was  quite  impossible  to 
gather  up  every  rifle  in  the  Reich,  every  machine 
gun,  every  broken-down  cannon.  But  these  ex¬ 
perts  did  cause  the  delivery  of  military  material 
in  quantities  so  enormous  that  Germany  could 
have  no  reasonable  hope  of  fighting  again  for  a 
generation.  Further,  they  put  a  guard  on  every 
German  steel  factory,  in  order  to  see  that  no  more 
arms  were  manufactured.  Of  course  the  Junkers, 
the  two  hundred  thousand  old  professional  officers 
and  the  militaristic  class  in  general  did  not  accept 
the  verdict  of  Versailles.  They  began  to  gather 
and  to  hide  such  arms  as  they  could  find.  In  this, 
they  had  two  motives.  First,  they  hoped  for  a 
Royalist  revolution  to  restore  the  Kaiser  and  the 
old  regime.  Second,  having  all  the  futility  which 
marks  a  privileged  class  suddenly  thrown  up 
against  realities,  some  of  them  still  really  imagine 
that  they  can  fight  France.  From  time  to  time, 
such  caches  are  discovered.  Three  machine  guns 
and  a  hundred  rifles  made  a  front  page  story  in 
every  Parisian  newspaper.  Among  the  tens  of 
thousands  of  cannon  used  at  the  front,  some  with 
their  bores  worn  out  or  with  essential  parts  miss- 


72 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


ing  are  always  at  the  rear,  awaiting  repairs. 
Germany,  like  France  and  England,  was  at  the 
Armistice  full  of  such  broken-down  weaponry. 
The  Junkers  concealed  some  of  these  guns,  doubt¬ 
less  with  a  few  others  in  good  repair.  When  such 
were  found,  the  Parisian  press  made  the  type 
do  a  hysterical  dance  of  fear  and  apprehension. 
Some  one  compiled  the  list  of  seizures  reported 
by  the  daily  press.  Without  doubt  this  included 
duplicates  and  cases  of  pure  “fake.”  But  the 
statistician  of  hate  who  did  the  work  ignored  all 
that.  He  estimated  solemnly  that  enough  arms 
had  been  found  to  equip  from  twenty  to  thirty 
German  divisions.  Even  had  his  data  rested  on 
sound  proofs,  not  upon  mere  sensational  reports, 
his  conclusion  was  full  of  holes.  Nothing,  posi¬ 
tively  nothing,  was  said  about  the  condition  of 
these  arms;  neutral  military  experts,  knowing 
that  a  cannon  is  not  a  cannon  unless  it  will  shoot, 
laughed  at  such  figures.  But  the  French,  appre¬ 
hensive  with  the  memory  of  two  devastating  in¬ 
vasions,  accepted  them  only  too  readily.  And 
they  drew  the  inference  which  the  propagandists 
intended.  Germany,  though  now  nominally  a 
Republic,  was  the  same  Germany;  a  poisonous, 
treacherous  serpent  which,  a  little  scotched,  could 
still  strike.  Therefore  she  must  be  crushed  with¬ 
out  mercy,  and — until  crushed — she  must  be 


KEEPING  THE  POISON  ACTIVE 


73 


hated  with  all  the  French  heart  and  soul  and 
mind. 

As  the  Peace  of  Versailles  through  various  suc¬ 
cessive  misinterpretations  became  a  peace  of  hate, 
the  propaganda  of  the  German  conservatives  bore 
fruit,  even  among  those  who  would  have  seen  the 
eternal  devil  keep  his  state  in  Berlin  as  easily  as 
a  Kaiser.  In  every  defeated  nation  there  arise 
quaint  personages  who  can  prove  by  incontro¬ 
vertible  facts  that  their  side  really  won  the  war. 
The  South  knew  such  phenomenal  thinkers  after 
1860,  France  after  1870.  It  is  the  only  way  to 
reconcile  their  pride  with  existence  as  members  of 
a  conquered  nation.  This  peculiarity  of  the  de¬ 
feated,  the  Junkers  proceeded  to  capitalize.  The 
German  army,  they  said,  had  been  ever  victorious. 
It  was  merely  making  a  strategic  retreat  in  order 
to  gain  a  stronger  position  when  the  lying,  treach¬ 
erous  Wilson  broke  down  by  his  false  promises 
the  German  civilian  morale.  Then  came  the  revo¬ 
lution  and  surrender  in  the  midst  of  victory.  I 
need  not  perhaps  tell  any  competent  observer  who 
witnessed  at  the  Front  the  last  days  of  the  war, 
that  this  is  all  contrary  to  fact — the  whole  Ger¬ 
man  strategic  scheme  stood  on  the  verge  of  col¬ 
lapse.  Nor  did  the  German  people  at  first  gen¬ 
erally  believe  this  stuff.  But  the  reactionary 
press  and  the  imposing  string  of  newspapers 


74 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


purchased  by  the  great  industrial  men  hammered 
it  into  the  German  head.  As  the  French  and 
German  opinion  on  reparations  and  security 
separated  more  and  more  widely,  as  Germany 
tried  by  chicanery  to  dodge  her  obligation,  as 
France  took  irritating  means  of  enforcing  her  de¬ 
mands,  as  emotion  drugged  reason,  this  theory 
gripped  the  German  people,  until  even  Social 
Democrats  who  laughed  at  the  “ever  victorious” 
theory  in  1919,  embraced  it  by  1923.  With  it,  they 
swallowed  its  corollary.  France  was  responsible. 
France  had  injected  the  poison  into  Wilson,  engi¬ 
neered  the  betrayal.  Therefore,  hate  France  with 
“hate  of  the  head  and  hate  of  the  hand” — 
treacherous,  grasping,  cruel,  immoral  France! 

Let  the  current  of  hate  running  between  these 
two  outstanding  old  rivals  stand  for  the  rest  of 
Europe.  Hate  everywhere  expressed  in  lunatic 
thoughts  muttered  from  strained  faces ;  hate  uni¬ 
versal,  unreasoned,  divinely  ridiculous.  Misled  by 
sophistries  and  half  truths  no  different  in  spirit, 
the  Pole  hates  the  Lithuanian  and  Russian,  the 
Lithuanian  and  Russian  the  Pole;  the  Italian  the 
Jugo-Slav,  the  Jugo-Slav  the  Italian;  the  Rouma¬ 
nian  the  Magyar,  the  Magyar  the  Roumanian. 

Recently,  the  high  priests  of  hatred  have 
reached  toward  the  very  foundations  of  society. 
Deliberately,  they  are  beginning  in  infancy  this 


KEEPING  THE  POISON  ACTIVE 


75 


education  in  the  emotion  essential  to  war.  When 
the  French  entered  Alsace-Lorraine,  the  govern¬ 
ment  gave  a  Christmas  party  to  the  Alsatian  chil¬ 
dren.  A  most  eminent  lady  served  among  the 
hostesses.  To  each  child  she  handed  a  picture 
book,  professedly  designed  to  “help  make  them 
French.”  This  seemed  like  bringing  coals  to  New¬ 
castle.  Whoever  thinks  that  Alsace  was  not  glad 
to  rejoin  the  Republic  did  not  witness  the  entry 
of  1919.  The  brief  selections  began  with  simple 
stories  of  France — her  legitimate  glories,  her 
beauties,  her  eminence  in  the  arts.  For  the  rest 
it  was  hate — unadulterated  vitriol.  For  example, 
one  series  of  colored  pictures,  drawn  in  the  spirit 
of  our  comic  strips,  showed  a  nice  little  Alsatian 
boy  playing  all  kinds  of  tricks  on  a  German  be¬ 
cause  he  was  a  German.  Another  reproduced  the 
familiar  figure  of  the  blood-drunken  brute.  Now 
I  repeat:  it  was  scarcely  necessary  to  instruct 
these  children  in  loving  France.  The  very  fact  of 
attendance  at  this  party  proved  that  their  parents 
were  of  the  Francophile  element.  And,  indeed, 
that  was  not  the  object.  They  had  lived  their  brief 
lives  beside  Germans.  Some  of  them  probably 
knew  kindly  old  German  gentlemen,  German 
ladies  who  gave  them  kisses  and  cakes,  congenial 
little  German  classmates.  It  was  necessary  to 
erase  at  once  such  immoral,  unpatriotic  impres- 


76 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


sions  and  to  teach  them,  as  early  as  possible, 
*  ‘  righteous  hate. 9  9 

Evidently  this  method  seemed  advisable  not 
only  for  little  Alsatians  but  for  little  Frenchmen. 
I  have  seen  lately  a  copy  of  Fournier’s  First 
French  reader,  published  by  Gedalge,  Paris,  in 
1921.  This  is  the  eighth  edition,  the  four  hun¬ 
dred  and  tenth  thousand.  Rapid  calculation 
proves  what  a  proportion  of  the  French  children 
in  primary  classes  must  be  doing  their  first  con¬ 
secutive  reading  from  this  book.  The  fashions 
in  the  drawings  show  that  it  is  an  old  reader 
current  before  1914,  but  revamped  for  current 
circulation  by  six  “readings  on  the  Great  War.” 
The  first  of  these  (Reading  Number  37)  deals  with 
the  mutilated  children.  It  revives  a  hate  story 
which  I  have  mentioned  before.  The  scene  is  a 
school.  Enter  a  Belgian  boy  from  Dinant: 

The  poor  child,  whose  mother  is  a  refugee  among  us, 
has  both  his  hands  cut  off.  It  is  the  Germans  who  have 
so  martyred  him.  They  have  killed  also  his  father,  his 
sister  and  his  big  brother. 

Reading  Number  38,  “The  Wooden  Gun,”  tells 
an  atrocity  story  very  popular  during  the  war.  I 
do  not  say  that  this  incident  did  not  happen;  but 
as  none  of  the  published  accounts  which  I  saw 
gave  names,  dates,  or  places,  I  view  it  with  the 


KEEPING  THE  POISON  ACTIVE 


77 


skepticism  of  a  veteran  journalist.  As  Reading 
Number  38  begins  tbe  story,  a  group  of  little  boys 
in  a  Lorraine  village  are  playing  soldier  with 
wooden  guns  and  swords.  Suddenly  the  Germans 
come.  One  of  the  children  points  his  wooden  gun, 
gives  the  order,  “Aim!  Fire!” 

Is  it  possible?  It  is  the  turn  of  the  brigands  to  be 
afraid.  A  seven-year  old  child  has  made  them  tremble. 
A  soldier  points  his  piece  at  this  audacious  child.  A  shot 
sounds ;  the  child  falls,  struck  in  the  heart.  O  Germans  1 
"What  a  crime,  what  cowardice!  Are  there  among  you 
no  fathers  who  love  their  children  ? 

Reading  Number  41,  entitled  “The  Cathedrals 
Of  Rheims,”  is  a  dialogue  between  a  mother  and 
her  little  son.  The  deliberate  bombardment  of 
this  irreplaceable  building  is,  of  course,  one  of 
many  black  spots  on  the  German  war  record. 
However,  here  is  how  it  comes  off  in  the  Fournier 
reader. 

.  .  .  The  Cathedral  of  Rheims  is  in  flames.  To-mor¬ 
row,  perhaps,  it  will  be  only  a  heap  of  ruins. 

“Why  have  they  done  that?  A  Cathedral — that  is 
sacred  to  every  one !  ’  ’ 

“They  respect  nothing,  these  wretches!  They  have 
killed  children,  women,  old  men ;  they  have  finished  off 
our  wounded;  they  have  burned  the  houses  of  our  vil¬ 
lages;  they  have  bombarded  our  hospitals,  our  ambu¬ 
lances;  they  shrink  from  no  crime  which  will  injure 
us.  ... 


78 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


‘  ‘  Tell  me,  my  son,  ’ ’  said  my  mother,  searching  to  the 
very  depths  of  my  eyes,  “you  will  not  forget  these 
crimes  V 7 

“I  promise,  mother.” 

The  same  firm  publishes  Pour  Notre  France, 
a  book  of  supplementary  reading  on  the  war  for 
elementary  classes.  Sprinkled  through  it  is  the 
same  thought  which  marks  the  First  Reader.  But 
the  most  noteworthy  passage,  to  one  who  knows 
Europe,  is  in  the  introduction — a  kind  of  dialogue 
between  a  master  and  his  pupil : 

“That  word  Patrie  [your  country]  do  you  understand 
it,  my  children?” 

“What  is  La  Patrie?” 

“La  Patrie  is  a  living  thing ;  it  has  a  body ,  it  has  a 
soul.” 

The  italics  are  the  author’s,  not  mine.  The 
teacher  repeats,  again  in  italics : 

i(But  your  country  has  a  soul!” 

These  words,  taken  as  they  stand,  may  not  at 
once  appear  so  terribly  significant.  But  here,  in 
one  phrase,  is  the  basis  of  that  State  worship 
which  generated  German  militarism,  which  in  turn 
precipitated  the  World  War. 

Philosophical  theory  has  more  empirical  bear¬ 
ing  on  the  thoughts  and  actions  of  Continental 
Europe  than  the  more  practical-minded  British 


KEEPING  THE  POISON  ACTIVE 


79 


and  Americans  can  readily  comprehend.  Under 
the  doctrine  by  which  the  Pan-German  ruled 
his  people,  the  State  has  a  soul.  It  is  not  a 
mere  collection  of  individuals,  it  is  a  high,  sep¬ 
arate  entity,  demanding  absolute  loyalty ;  if  neces¬ 
sary,  absolute  sacrifice.  “The  greatest  good  to 
the  greatest  number”  is  in  this  view  merely 
an  immoral  republican  fancy.  It  is  one’s  duty 
to  further  the  interests  of  the  State,  no  matter 
if  his  act  injures  all  the  individuals  who  compose 
it.  Still  less  has  the  individual  citizen  of  any 
other  nationality  the  least  right  or  privilege 
in  conflict  with  that  supreme  interest.  Once 
this  view  is  accepted  with  its  corollaries,  it  fol¬ 
lows  that  conquest,  which  advances  the  glory 
of  the  State,  becomes  finally  a  consecrated  under¬ 
taking. 

This,  perhaps,  is  a  digression.  The  stern,  un- 
escapable,  fact  is  that  in  the  schools  of  France, 
where  up  to  1914  those  intelligent,  pleasant,  able 
French  schoolmasters  taught  that  war  is  an  evil 
and  that  the  best  course  for  a  nation  is  to  find 
ways  for  getting  on  with  her  neighbors,  are  now 
forced  whether  they  wish  or  no  to  mold  the  plastic 
mind  of  childhood  into  the  grotesque,  contorted 
forms  of  unreasoning  hatred. 

It  is  easy  for  her  friends  to  forgive  France.  We 
who  watched  her  through  the  war  know  how  she 


80 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


suffered  from  her  second  brutal  invasion  of  a 
century.  We  know  how  isolated  she  feels  since 
America  and  England  withdrew  their  support, 
how  tormenting  is  the  fear  that  it  will  happen 
again.  Her  state  of  nerves  is  natural  to  a  high- 
strung  people.  But  the  fact  remains  that  her 
men  of  affairs  are  poisoning  the  minds  of  a  rising 
generation. 

Germany  comes  off  no  better  by  comparison. 
She,  also,  teaches  hatred  in  her  common  schools. 
Germany,  say  her  teachers,  was  before  the  war 
ringed  with  enemies.  In  the  war,  her  armies 
were  everywhere  victorious.  But  Wilson  per¬ 
suaded  the  people  to  listen  to  his  lying  promises. 
Germany  laid  down  her  arms.  Whereupon  the 
brutal  French,  with  their  barbaric  black  troops, 
came  to  persecute  the  Fatherland.  Therefore, 
Frances  is  to  be  hated — hated — hated! — — ' “Hate 
of  the  heart  and  hate  of  the  hand!”  This 
educational  propaganda,  confined  at  first  to  dis¬ 
tricts  and  institutions  controlled  by  the  reaction¬ 
ary  element,  has  spread  to  the  other  schools.  Ger¬ 
many  also  is  training  a  new  generation  of  blind 
haters. 

The  chapter  on  Germany  in  the  Belgian  pri¬ 
mary  school  geography  makes  the  French  first 
reader  seem  mild  and  loving  by  comparison.  An 
eminent  Viennese  professor,  writing  to  his  friends 


KEEPING  THE  POISON  ACTIVE 


81 


of  the  shocking  conditions  at  home,  concludes, 
6  ‘  and  to  cap  the  climax  we  are  teaching  in  the 
schools  that  same  hatred  which  did  so  much  to 
bring  on  the  war.”  Roumania  adds  a  touch  al¬ 
most  comic.  In  the  settlement  of  the  war,  she  was 
given  part  of  Transylvania.  In  some  towns  of 
this  region,  the  Hungarian  element  preponderates. 
Yet  the  little  Hungarian  children  are  reciting 
from  textbook  breathing  hate  against  their  race. 
A  friend  who  has  seen  this  educational  curiosity 
remembers  one  passage: 

Q.  Who  are  the  Huns? 

A.  A  savage  and  cruel  people  who  swept  down  on  the 
Romans  and  destroyed  their  civilization  .  .  .  they  re¬ 
mained  in  brutal  and  tyrannical  power  for  a  thousand 
years. 

Can  we  Americans  afford  to  look  down  upon 
these  frenzies  of  the  European!  After  all,  we  are 
blood  of  their  blood.  Near  my  summer  home  in 
Plymouth  County,  Massachusetts,  dwell  the 
descendents  of  the  Pilgrim  Fathers,  some  carry¬ 
ing  yet  the  original  names,  as  Miles  Standish 
and  John  Alden.  The  Miles  Standish  of  our  town 
descends  in  the  tenth  generation  from  his  famous 
forebear  of  the  Mayflower .  And  this  is  the  very 
oldest  white  American  blood.  If  we  could  gather 
and  compile  the  statistics,  we  should  doubtless 


82 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


find  the  average  American  removed  no  more  than 
three  or  four  generations  from  the  parent  stock 
of  Europe.  Even  ten  generations — what  is  that 
in  the  history  of  a  race?  Circumstances  have  per¬ 
mitted  us  to  eliminate  from  our  thought  that  sense 
of  the  past  which  hangs  like  a  stone  about  the 
neck  of  Europe,  and  to  create  a  political  system 
which  has  hitherto  looked  forward,  not  backward. 
Circumstances  too,  have  delivered  us  from  the  in¬ 
tense  economic  and  social  rivalries  produced  by 
the  crowded  conditions  of  those  old  countries. 
But  at  bottom,  we  are  the  same  people.  Drop  the 
average  American  into  France,  England  or 
Austria  as  a  baby,  give  him  the  education  of  the 
country,  and  he  would  as  a  man  think,  feel  and 
behave  like  the  people  of  his  adoption. 

Nor  can  we  indulge  any  national  conceit  by 
holding  ourselves  superior  to  Europe  in  the  spirit 
of  tolerance.  In  the  modern  world,  it  is  impos¬ 
sible  to  quarantine  ideas  and  world  emotions,  good 
or  bad.  A  hundred  years  ago,  the  monarchs  and 
premiers  of  the  Holy  Alliance  tried  that;  and 
Metternich,  who  had  bent  to  the  task  every  power 
of  his  subtle  genius,  was  finally  driven  into  exile 
by  force  of  those  liberal  ideas  which  he  had  tried 
to  kill.  Ideas  and  common  emotions  blow  like 
great  winds  across  seas  and  borders;  and  the 
epidemic  of  hate  rages  among  us  also. 


KEEPING  THE  POISON  ACTIVE 


83 


Only  in  America  the  disease  takes  a  different 
form.  Thanks  to  onr  former  isolation,  we  have 
acquired  no  “hereditary  enemies.’ ’  When  this 
vague  emotion  begins  to  disturb  our  bosoms,  we 
take  it  out  on  each  other.  A  half-baked  farmer 
boy  listens  to  an  orator  who  proclaims  that  all 
Jews  are  Shylocks  and  usurers,  bound  by  gory 
oaths  to  destroy  Christianity,  all  Catholics  idol 
worshipers  and  subjects  of  a  sinister  foreign 
power,  all  new  immigrants  filthy  scum.  So  he 
joins  bizarre  orders  which  ride  by  night  that  they 
may  rescue  America  from  her  peril.  The  venom 
in  all  this  gives  him  a  vaguely  pleasant  emotion, 
doubtless;  it  is  like  those  diseased  but  agreeable 
moods  which  one  has  sometimes  in  a  fever.  The 
farmer  boy  would  neither  understand  nor  believe, 
if  you  told  him  that  the  bacillus  from  which  he  is 
suffering  first  appeared  in  the  brain  of  some 
European  reactionary,  plotting  for  his  own  pur¬ 
poses  to  make  everlasting  the  hates  of  the  late 
war. 

Never  since  the  Civil  War  have  we  known  in 
peace  times  such  universal,  unquiet  hatred;  we, 
who  in  1913  were  as  a  great  family.  The  immi¬ 
gration  problem  presses  for  solution.  I  will  not 
deny  that  foreign  population  has  come  of  late  too 
fast  for  assimilation  to  the  best  American  ideals. 
But  instead  of  treating  the  matter  soberly  and 


84 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


reasonably,  as  I  think  we  did  once,  we  are  melt¬ 
ing  into  cauldrons  of  rage  or  freezing  into  icicles 
of  cold  national  conceit.  For  the  first  time  anti- 
Semitism — the  invention  of  European  reaction¬ 
aries  and  absolutists  to  distract  the  national  will 
of  peoples — has  achieved  a  foothold  among  us. 
Pseudo-scientists  and  pseudo-sociologists  have 
created  a  new  American  literature  of  national  con¬ 
ceit;  they  are  prototypes  of  the  Gobineaus,  the 
Treitschkes  and  the  Bernhardis  who  created  in 
Germany  the  false,  bloated  pride  which  leads  to 
a  fall.  In  the  slang  of  this  gentry,  the  term 
“  Nordic ”  holds  place  of  honor.  The  original 
'Americans  were  Nordic.  The  Nordic  is  the  great 
race;  wisdom  and  power  will  die  with  it.  One 
able  writer  of  this  faction  even  divides  our  litera¬ 
ture  into  Nordic  and  non-Nordic.  There  is  some 
very  decent  work  in  the  non-Nordic  catagory,  he 
admits;  but  it  is  distinguished  always  by  a  lack 
of  order,  proportion,  taste,  ulterior  wisdom.  Yet 
—to  take  the  achievement  which  these  prophets 
of  national  conceit  would  value  most  highly — the 
Romans,  lawgivers  to  all  Empires,  the  Spaniards, 
who  opened  up  the  Americans  and  held  the  great¬ 
est  Empire  known  to  the  world,  were  not  Nordic; 
and  the  French,  for  all  their  glorious  national 
history,  are  only  imperfectly  so.  To  take  other 
values,  the  Italians  who  for  three  centuries  domi- 


KEEPING  THE  POISON  ACTIVE 


85 


nated  the  spiritual,  artistic  and  intellectual 
activity  of  Europe,  are  swart,  black-eyed,  non- 
Nordic.  It  is  only  a  step  further — we  shall  prob¬ 
ably  achieve  something  like  that  in  a  year  or  so 
— to  the  excesses  of  certain  German  professors 
who  first  drew  political  inferences  from  the  Nor¬ 
dic  racial  theory.  Your  German,  they  say,  is  the 
only  simon  pure  Nordic.  In  such  races  as  the 
English,  the  crystal  stream  is  badly  adulterated. 
The  English  are  able  only  in  so  far  as  they  are 
Nordic.  The  same  holds  true,  even  in  the  in¬ 
ferior  Latin  races;  throwbacks  to  Teutonic  an¬ 
cestors,  planted  in  the  South  during  the  Germanic 
invasions,  account  for  all  their  men  of  genius  and 
eminence.  For  example,  Giuseppe  Garibaldi.  Fix 
your  mind  on  the  third  syllable  of  his  surname — 
“bald.”  That  is  an  old  German  root  much  used 
in  Teutonic  proper  names.  His  light  hair 
furnishes  further  proof  that  he  was  the  re¬ 
creation,  under  the  Mendelian  law,  of  some 
Teutonic  ancestor  who  entered  Italy  with  the 
Lombards.  Dante,  Da  Vinci  and  Michael  Angelo 
had  dark  eyes  and  swarthy  complexions.  How¬ 
ever,  in  mind  they  too  must  have  been  throwbacks 
to  Germanic  ancestors  lost  in  the  haze  of  history. 
Their  genius  proves  that. 

Conceited  nationalism  and  academic  absurdity 
cannot  go  much  further.  If  any  one  accom- 


86 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


plishes  this  feat,  it  will  be  one  of  our  own  Nordic 
theorists. 

We  are  considering  war  only  in  that  aspect 
which  concerns  Christianity — its  moral  gain  and 
harm.  Again  let  us  try  to  strike  a  balance.  On 
the  one  side  lies  the  sacrifice  of  the  soldiers.  If 
we  add  to  that  the  sacrifice  of  the  civilian,  we 
have,  I  think,  almost  the  whole  positive  moral 
value  of  war.  And  civilian  sacrifice  is  a  subject 
surrounded  by  a  rosy  aureole  of  fake.  The 
average  man  or  woman  who  ate  war  bread  and 
endured  meatless  days  did  not  act  of  his  own  pure 
moral  volition.  Actually  or  virtually  he  was 
ordered  to  do  so.  If  he  disobeyed,  he  incurred  the 
penalties  of  legal  arrest  or  social  ostracism. 
Further,  he  was  impelled  by  a  far-seeking  self- 
interest.  If  his  side  lost  the  war,  things  would 
go  worse  for  him,  not  better.  This  last  impulse 
governed  many  when  they  put  their  money  into 
government  bonds.  Further,  the  social  penalty 
had  here  its  influence.  The  man  who  did  not  buy 
in  good  proportion  to  his  means  lost  standing  in 
the  community.  There  were  those,  of  course,  who 
performed  acts  of  sacrifice  which  ran  contrary  to 
their  interests  and  their  natural  desires.  Let  me 
not  belittle  the  heroism  of  that  father  or  mother 
who  said  to  the  beloved  volunteer,  ‘ 4  Go,  my  son !  ’ 9 


KEEPING  THE  POISON  ACTIVE 


87 


Their  activities  and  renunciations  must  he  thrown 
into  the  scale  with  the  soldier’s  sacrifice  of  com¬ 
fort  and  life.  “War  work,”  however,  introduces 
exceedingly  tangled  motives.  Virtually  no  one 
outside  of  the  leisured  class — in  which  I  include 
the  unworking,  unmarried  daughters  of  people  in 
only  moderate  circumstances — made  bandages  or, 
ran  canteens  or  drove  ambulances.  For  this  class, 
somewhat  surfeited  with  the  pleasures  and  plen¬ 
ties  of  a  lavishly  productive  age,  the  war 
amounted  to  a  new  thrill;  without  danger  and 
without  undue  hardship  they  lived  in  a  whirl  of 
agreeable  excitement  and  untrammeled,  unconven¬ 
tional  social  contact.  I  met  one  such  at  the  Front 
— an  expatriate  American  woman  with  a  talent 
for  brutal  self-analysis — in  late  October,  1918. 

“I  believe  the  war  is  nearly  over,”  said  I, 
“ everything  points  toward  an  armistice.” 

4 4 Oh,  don’t  say  that!”  she  replied,  “my  dear 
war!” 

Had  most  other  war  workers  consulted  their 
selfish  desires  alone,  not  their  consciences,  their 
sense  of  propriety  or  their  higher  spirit  of  altru¬ 
ism,  I  have  no  doubt  but  they  would  have  agreed 
with  her.  One  stock  argument  to  prove  the 
moral  value  of  war,  I  dismiss  as  moonshine.  This 
is  the  idea  cherished  by  German,  British  and 
American  militarists  alike,  that  men  grow  soft 


88 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


in  peace ;  that  war  is  necessary  now  and  then  in 
order  to  keep  peoples  hard.  What  kind  of  hard¬ 
ness?  Ask  the  militarist  that,  and  if  he  is  off  his 
guard  he  completes  the  vicious  circle  of  his  reason¬ 
ing  by  answering  that  it  is  the  kind  of  hardness 
which  succeeds  in  war.  Not  even  that  is  true, 
however,  as  any  fair  survey  of  our  late  and  bitter 
experience  will  prove.  Elsewhere 1  I  have  shown 
how  little  the  men  of  Armageddon,  as  compared 
to  those  of  past  generations,  knew  in  advance  of 
war  as  a  reality,  and  how  much  the  valor  of 
Armageddon  exceeded  that  of  Thermopylae  or 
Balaklava  or  Troy  or  any  of  the  military  episodes 
about  which  we  write  heroic  ballads.  “Hardness 
through  war,”  was  not  the  least  of  the  air-puffed 
military  theories  which  blew  up  in  the  heats  of 
Armageddon.  The  great  sacrifices  of  soldiers,  the 
lesser  sacrifices  of  civilians — in  weighing  moral 
values  you  have  here  all  the  factors  which  you 
may  fairly  put  into  the  favorable  scale. 

Into  the  other  scale  we  have  put  already  the 
blind,  blasting,  soul-contorting,  illogical  hates  of 
war.  On  that  we  must  pile  up  five  more  years, 
so  far  endured,  of  hatreds  only  a  little  less  violent 
and  much  more  widespread.  And  looking  into 
the  future,  we  may  fairly  add  whole  races  and 
generations  whose  souls,  deliberately  warped  by 


i  The  Next  War,  E.  P.  Dutton  and  Co.,  1921. 


KEEPING  THE  POISON  ACTIVE 


89 


miseducation,  will  live  in  violation  of  the  second 
among  the  Great  Commandments — 4 ‘Thou  shalt 
love  thy  neighbor  as  thyself.’ ’  Who  will  say  that 
the  scales  are  even  at  balance  now ;  that  the  moral 
good  of  war  equals  its  harm!  And  I  have  not  yet 
exhausted  the  evil  effects  of  war  on  the  souls  of 
men  and  of  peoples. 


CHAPTER  VI 


WHAT  DOES  IT  MATTER? 

The  State,  says  Spinoza,  is  not  bound  by  the 
moral  law.  By  inference,  bearing  false  witness, 
stealing  and  killing,  acts  condemned  when  their 
victim  is  an  individual,  become  virtuous  when  per¬ 
formed  in  the  service  of  one’s  country.  So  he 
stated  baldly  and  truthfully  a  principle  which, 
however  hypocritically  denied,  had  long  been 
tacitly  accepted.  In  the  Nineteenth  Century,  when 
hazy  ideas  of  honor  held  small  importance  in  the 
traffic  of  nations  and  commercial  self-interest  be¬ 
came  the  guiding  motive,  international  relations 
ceased  almost  to  have  the  decency  of  hypocrisy. 
Statesmen  who  in  private  life  were  sincere  pillars 
of  some  established  church,  conspired  in  their 
public  capacity  to  steal  the  documents  of  the 
enemy,  to  inspire  by  devious  methods  riots  and 
murders  among  primitive  peoples,  to  ruin  the  eco¬ 
nomic  life  of  whole  provinces.  With  full  knowl¬ 
edge  of  what  they  were  doing,  they  employed  in¬ 
telligence  services  whose  spies,  on  behalf  of  the 
State  with  a  soul,  broke  every  law  of  God  and 


90 


WHAT  DOES  IT  MATTER? 


91 


man.  A  school  of  melodramatic  fiction  centered 
round  the  operations  of  these  secret  agents;  but 
even  the  imaginations  of  E.  Phillips  Oppenheim 
pale  beside  the  reality.  4 4  Chiefs  of  section’ 9  in¬ 
oculated  weak  but  shrewd  men  with  the  drug  habit 
and  sent  them  out,  under  promise  of  more  drugs, 
to  gather  information  and  documents.  Women 
yielded  up  their  chastity — and  justified  themselves 
in  the  act — in  order  to  wheedle  out  of  a  love-sick 
general  the  enemy’s  military  plans  or  out  of  a 
sentimental  politician  his  diplomatic  intentions. 
Thugs  of  the  underworld  plied  the  slung-shot  and 
blackjack  in  order  to  steal  papers  or  to  remove 
men  who  knew  too  much  and  would  not  hold  their 
tongues.  And  the  diplomat  himself  capitalized 
and  specialized  untruth  until  the  crooked  prin¬ 
ciples  of  diplomatic  intercourse  which  Machiavelli 
wrote  half  as  satire  in  the  sixteenth  century,  be¬ 
came  accepted  working  theories  in  the  nineteenth. 
When  an  ambassador  or  chancellor  of  embassy 
made  a  proposal  or  asserted  a  fact  bearing  upon 
diplomatic  business,  you  could  be  sure  of  only  one 
thing — that  he  did  not  mean  what  he  said. 

Early  in  the  war,  Herbert  Hoover  founded  his 
Commission  to  feed  ravished,  starving  Belgium. 
His  staff  consisted  of  Americans,  mostly  engi¬ 
neers,  who  had  great  natural  energy  and  ability 
but  no  previous  training  in  diplomacy.  Within 


92 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


six  months  Hoover  and  his  men  had  performed 
the  impossible,  had  created,  as  a  British  states¬ 
man  put  it,  “a  new  power  in  Europe.’ ’  They 
accomplished  this  result  by  a  method  so  natural 
that  they  themselves  were  long  unaware  of  its 
effectiveness.  When  they  entered  upon  negotia¬ 
tions,  they  presented  their  case  truthfully,  stated 
their  objects  frankly.  “We  will  do  thus  and  so,” 
they  would  say  with  the  directness  of  business 
men  proposing  an  honest  deal,  “if  you  will  do 
this  and  that.”  The  diplomats  with  whom  they 
negotiated  began  at  once  to  wonder  what  these 
iYankees  really  wanted.  Of  course,  it  wasn’t  what 
they  said  they  wanted.  .  .  .  Thereupon,  they 
granted  the  request  at  once,  and  waited  for  the 
next  move.  They  were  astonished  and  baffled 
when  the  Americans  accepted  and  went  ahead. 
This  method  should  have  worn  itself  out  in  time ; 
but  as  a  matter  of  fact  it  never  did.  They  who 
governed  international  politics  before  the  Great 
War  could  understand  any  diplomatic  approach 
except  the  truth! 

Yet  we  Americans  as  a  nation  cannot  cast  the 
first  stone.  Until  1914,  international  issues  cut 
very  little  figure  in  our  thought  or  our  common 
interests.  We  were  not  circumstanced  like 
Europe,  where  an  increase  in  Austrian  armament 
meant  an  immediate  rise  in  French  taxes,  where 


WHAT  DOES  IT  MATTER? 


93 


the  absorption  of  an  African  province  by  England 
meant  the  failure  of  factories  across  the  Rhine, 
where  the  shifting  of  a  German  strategic  railroad 
meant  hard  times  in  Sweden.  We  solace  our 
national  conceit  by  memories  of  the  generosities 
in  American  diplomatic  history,  as  when  we  gave 
back  to  Chinese  higher  education  our  share  of  the 
Boxer  indemnity.  Yet  when  the  shoe  pinched, 
when  our  larger  interests  became  vitally  involved, 
we  showed  no  more  national  morality  than  the 
Europeans.  The  methods  by  which  we  got  the 
Panama  Canal  zone  do  not  square  with  any  sys¬ 
tem  of  personal  morals  above  those  of  the  cave¬ 
man  ;  and  one  of  the  best  antidotes  for  American 
national  conceit  is  to  study  the  causes  and  pre¬ 
liminaries  of  the  Mexican  War. 

No,  the  world  had  by  the  middle  of  the  nine¬ 
teenth  century  generally  accepted  the  principle 
that  the  morals  of  nations  have  nothing  to  do  with 
common  morals.  The  world  mind,  however,  was 
a  little  tangled.  Men  liked  to  believe  that  their 
own  nation  behaved  honorably  in  the  matter  of 
keeping  its  promises.  A  strong  minority  body  of 
opinion  disapproved  of  the  repudiation  or  viola¬ 
tion  of  treaties.  They  were  repudiated  and 
violated,  however;  but  always  the  statesmen  who 
did  the  work  found  it  necessary  to  invent  some 
plausible  excuse.  Spinoza’s  principle  of  cor- 


94 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


porate  morals  had  found  perfect  acceptance. 
Machiavelli ’s  “  Prince  ”  was  now  the  guide  to  in¬ 
ternational  politics. 

All  this  in  a  period  of  peace.  What,  after  that, 
could  one  expect  when  the  peace  broke  into  a 
desperate  war  of  forty  million  men?  Now  nothing 
that  was  God’s  remained  lovely  and  of  good 
repute  unless  it  served  the  purposes  of  Mars.  “I 
don’t  want  soft  sermons  about  love  from  you, 
sir,”  said  a  Colonel  to  his  Chaplain.  4 4 Give  these 
men  the  stuff  that  makes  ’em  hard — hard!”  The 
preacher  who  remained  popular  with  the  crowd 
and  the  government  alike  were  those  most  zealous 
in  calling  down  the  curses  of  God  upon  the  enemy. 
And  the  State,  not  the  Church,  made  the  ethics  of 
this  hectic  period.  Officialdom  generally  found  it 
convenient  to  have  moral  soldiers.  A  man  who 
does  not  drink  or  run  after  women  or  practice 
deception  on  his  officers  makes  a  better  fighting 
machine;  your  soldier  must  above  all  things  be 
healthy  and  dependable.  Where  personal  morality 
became  for  any  reason  inconvenient,  it  was 
morality,  not  morale,  which  went  by  the  board. 
The  picturesque  leading  ladies  of  the  war  were 
the  aviators.  Their  work  involved  a  dreadful 
tension,  unknown  to  men  of  other  arms.  In  cer¬ 
tain  circumstances,  ten  minutes  in  the  air  could 
be  ten  days  of  apprehension,  alertness,  action  and 


WHAT  DOES  IT  MATTER? 


95 


strain.  In  this  atmosphere,  they  who  survived 
found  after  a  year  or  so  that  their  nerves  were 
going.  The  ace  of  aces  in  the  French  army,  after 
nearly  two  years  of  steady  flying  at  the  front,  re¬ 
turned  to  Paris  on  leave  and  began  to  chase 
civilians  on  to  the  sidewalks  with  his  automobile. 
Arrested,  he  was  found  to  he  raving  mad.  After 
a  long  course  of  treatment,  he  recovered.  But 
this  episode  served  as  a  warning  to  the  officers  in 
charge  of  aviation.  An  aviator  must  he  “let 
down”  at  intervals,  or  he  would  betray  by  a  curi¬ 
ous  telltale  stutter  the  first  sign  of  impending 
nervous  break.  The  authorities  began  to  give 
frequent  leave,  and  to  encourage  these  boys,  either 
openly  or  tacitly,  to  “find  a  woman”  and  get 
thoroughly,  satisfactorily  drunk. 

As  the  strain  on  all  branches  of  the  service 
tightened,  they  who  directed  army  morale  grew 
concerned  about  the  condition  of  the  infantry. 
"When  the  weary  ranks  crawled  back  from  the 
filthy,  sleepless,  hysterical  atmosphere  of  the 
trenches  to  the  little  haven  of  the  rest  towns,  more 
and  more  they  showed  the  symptoms  precedent  to 
nervous  collapse.  They,  like  the  aviators,  must  be 
“let  down.”  Hence,  here  and  there,  brothels 
Under  semi-official  sanction,  brothels  surrounded 
with  sanitary  precautions — but  brothels  neverthe¬ 
less.  European  hotels  have  perhaps  never  been 


96 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


especially  careful  in  inspecting  the  character  of 
their  guests.  But  now — all  bars  came  down. 
Scarcely  a  hotel  in  London,  Paris,  Rome  or,  I  sup¬ 
pose,  Berlin,  but  knowingly  opened  its  doors  to 
shady  characters.  The  officers  on  leave  wanted 
them.  Lest  I  be  misunderstood,  let  me  here  make 
exception  of  the  American  army.  So  far  as  my 
knowledge  goes,  we  never  adopted  this  treatment 
for  mental  symptoms.  However,  the  “need” 
never  arose  with  us.  At  the  time  of  the  Armistice 
only  a  very  few  of  the  American  troops  had  seen 
more  than  seven  months  of  fighting;  for  the 
French,  German,  or  Belgian  conscript  who  entered 
the  army  in  1914  and  was  lucky  enough  to  survive, 
the  war  had  gone  fifty-two  months.  We  had  not 
yet  reached  the  period  of  strain.  In  the  same  cir¬ 
cumstances  it  is  fair  to  assume  that  we  might  have 
followed  Fmropean  methods  in  repairing  shat¬ 
tered  nerves. 

However,  the  significance  of  this  immorality  lies 
perhaps  not  in  the  fact  but  in  the  attitude  toward 
it  of  the  public  mind.  At  the  rear,  no  one,  moral¬ 
ist  though  he  might  be,  looked  much  askance  at 
the  peccadillos  of  the  soldier  on  leave.  In  the 
background  of  every  mind  stood  the  vision  of 
what  he  had  seen  and  endured,  must  again  see  and 
endure.  We  remembered  his  days  and  nights 
among  the  rotting  bodies  of  the  newly  dead,  his 


WHAT  DOES  IT  MATTER? 


97 


months  under  the  pressure  of  subconscious  fear, 
his  long  agonies  in  the  hospital  wards.  Soon  he 
must  return  to  all  that;  most  probably  to  his 
“rendezvous  with  death  by  some  disputed  bar¬ 
ricade.  ”  Anything  that  made  him  forget,  hectic 
or  unnatural  though  that  thing  might  be — he  was 
welcome  to  it!  “God  will  forgive/ ’  said  some; 
but  the  most  said,  “What  does  it  matter! ” 

What  did  it  matter  indeed?  Half-mad  as  we 
all  were,  with  that  curious  madness  which  is  the 
atmosphere  of  war,  we  had  for  once  laid  hold  on 
logic.  In  the  Christian  scheme  of  morals,  a  Ger¬ 
man  is  a  human  being  with  a  soul.  Civilians  and 
soldiers  alike,  we  were  all  working  for  the  purpose 
of  committing  against  that  German  the  one  act 
which  law  and  custom  hold  to  be  a  supreme  viola¬ 
tion  of  morals — killing.  True,  the  accepted  canon 
of  morals  specifically  excepted  killing  an  enemy  in 
war ;  but  if  war  so  sweetened  murder,  why  did  it 
not  sweeten  lesser  sins?  The  answer,  tacitly 
accepted,  was  that  it  did. 

As  the  war  dragged  on  into  months,  years, 
spiritual  aeons,  the  civilian  population  seemed  to 
borrow  from  the  soldier  this  dual  standard  of 
morals.  “What  did  it  matter — to  us  here  as  to 
them  up  there  V’  they  would  say,  waving  a  hand 
toward  the  Great  Line.  Standards  went  down; 
the  line  ordinarily  drawn  between  misconduct  and 


98 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


good  conduct  became  hazy.  The  situation  had 
its  curious  anomalies.  The  panegyrists  of  war 
called  loud  attention  to  the  London  police  statis¬ 
tics,  showing  a  diminution  of  arrests  for  crime 
and  drunkenness.  But  these  figures  meant 
nothing,  really.  Professional  crime  is  a  young 
man’s  game;  the  thugs  were  away  at  the  Front, 
where  the  army  was  making  use  of  their  native 
violences  and  subtleties.  Drunkenness  hampered 
the  conduct  of  the  war ;  the  manufacture  of 
alcohol  consumed  part  of  the  food  supply ;  and 
none  so  moral  as  a  nation  at  war  when  morality 
marches  with  efficiency.  Therefore  all  govern¬ 
ments,  the  British  among  them,  regulated  the 
manufacture  of  beers  and  spirits  and  greatly  re¬ 
duced  the  hours  when  public  drinking  was  per¬ 
mitted.  But  for  the  uncharted  rest — month  on 
month  I  saw  peoples  in  bulk  losing  their  hold  on 
ordinary  truth,  decency,  chastity  and  even  com¬ 
mon  honesty.  Arnold  Bennett  published  in  1918 
his  novel  The  Pretty  Lady ,  a  study  of  contem¬ 
porary  upper-class  morals.  The  British,  though 
they  stormed  against  the  book,  let  it  go  to  print; 
we,  being  at  the  moment  especially  afraid  of  un¬ 
popular  truth  in  certain  states  suppressed  it,  just 
as  we  suppressed  almost  universally  Barbousse’s 
terrible  but  accurate  Le  Feu.  In  my  experience 
The  Pretty  Lady,  showing  as  it  did  a  world  which 


WHAT  DOES  IT  MATTER? 


99 


had  lost  its  moral  rudder,  was  realistically  true. 
"What  Bennett  saw  in  England  any  observer  with 
the  same  shrewd  eyes  might  have  seen  in  France 
or  Italy,  and,  I  have  no  doubt,  in  Germany  or 
Austria. 

Yet — and  here  was  a  contradiction  which  per¬ 
haps  fooled  the  majority  of  observers — never  did 
formal  religion  seem  so  vital  as  during  the  years 
between  1914  and  1918.  I  saw  in  the  Sacre  Coeur 
of  Paris  a  congregation  of  three  thousand  people 
weeping  on  their  knees  for  their  sins  and  the 
sorrows  of  France ;  I  saw  the  whole  population  of 
Boulogne  following  a  religious  procession,  I  saw 
the  London  churches,  the  English-speaking  Prot¬ 
estant  churches  of  Paris,  crowded  to  the  side¬ 
walks.  There  were  new  shrines  everywhere— 
even  in  the  streets  of  London.  Yet  strangely 
enough  many  who  lived  most  strictly  by  such 
observances  were  in  their  daily  lives  most  at  vari¬ 
ance  with  the  canons  of  common  morality.  The 
Church  was  an  anchor,  a  rock  of  safety  in  a  great 
storm.  In  the  divine  mercy  of  God  lay  one  hope, 
and  the  only  one,  that  William  might  come  home 
alive  from  the  Front,  that  John  might  recover 
from  his  wound,  that  one’s  own  nation,  the  sure 
and  certain  vessel  of  the  right,  might  emerge 
triumphant.  But  somehow — the  cord  which 
bound  faith  with  the  conduct  of  life  had  snapped. 


100 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


The  war  ended ;  but  the  mere  fact  of  peace  did 
not  cure  the  sickness  of  our  morals.  Back  from 
the  violences  of  war  came  the  surviving  boy 
soldiers.  Only  the  strongest  and  sweetest  among 
them,  it  seemed,  had  brought  to  the  life  of  peace 
the  ordinary  morals  of  peace.  Their  souls  bore 
scars.  For  five  years  our  own  newspapers  have 
been  proclaiming  ‘ ‘crime  waves”;  but  we,  who 
bore  so  much  less  of  the  burden  than  the  Euro¬ 
pean  nations,  had  also  a  lesser  moral  breakdown. 
The  timid  tourist  who  visited  Europe  before  1914 
felt  at  least  a  sense  of  social  security.  The  Con¬ 
tinent  as  a  whole  might  strike  him  as  organized, 
ruled,  even  to  monotony ;  but  at  least  he  stood  in 
no  visible  danger  of  robbery  or  violence.  But  for 
two  years  after  1918  robbery  and  violence  were 
constant  problems  to  the  European  police.  Bands 
of  brigands  terrified  parts  of  Belgium  and  France. 
In  Berlin,  a  modern  Jack  Sheppard  led  a  gang  so 
bold  and  defiant  that  they  held  up  the  very  police 
stations.  One  entered  certain  parts  of  Europe 
with  the  apprehensions  which  must  have  disturbed 
a  mid-Victorian  British  tourist  visiting  an  early- 
day  American  mining  camp. 

Even  revolutions  have  their  rules  and  rhythms. 
For  example,  some  humorous  student  of  history 
has  noted  that  every  social  disturbance  dies  down 
between  noon  and  two  o’clock — the  rioters  have 


WHAT  DOES  IT  MATTER? 


101 


gone  home  to  eat.  Just  so,  all  radical  upheavals 
from  the  Jack  Cade  riots  to  Russian  Bolshevism 
have  about  the  same  human  composition.  At  the 
center  is  a  body  of  zealots,  believing  in  their 
special  tenets,  whether  sound  or  unsound,  with  a 
passionate,  all-consuming  zeal;  this  zeal  and  de¬ 
votion  fades  away  until  we  reach  the  outer  edge, 
which  is  composed  of  men  who  like  revolution  for 
itself — its  violence,  its  looting,  its  freedom  from 
ordinary  restraints.  This  “ criminal  fringe”  of 
all  the  revolutions  or  attempted  revolutions  since 
the  Armistice  has  been  so  large  as  often  to  set  the 
pace  for  the  whole  movement.  From  it  proceed 
the  outrageous  execution  of  the  Czar  and  his  little 
daughters,  the  occasional  bursts  of  cruel  violence 
against  priests  or  reactionaries  or  “ traitors,” 
which  have  marked  the  Bolshevik  regime.  Nor 
has  the  criminal  fringe  decorated  only  the  radical 
forces.  Some  of  the  “white”  armies  which  from 
time  to  time  attempted  to  restore  the  old  regime 
in  Russia  carried  along  noblemen  and  soldiers  of 
fortune  bitten  by  the  same  bacillus.  “Gentle¬ 
men”  they  might  be,  with  every  advantage  of 
education  and  environment ;  nevertheless  war  had 
bred  in  them  that  instinct  for  violence  and  for  get¬ 
ting  without  paying  which  marks  the  criminal. 
One  expedition  which  got  some  distance  with 
Russia  before  it  collapsed  hanged  every  peasant 


102 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


found  occupying  the  lands  of  his  former  lord.  In 
Berlin,  I  met  a  British  officer  who,  hating  Bol¬ 
shevism,  had  joined  a  Crusade  to  rescue  Russia. 
After  a  month  he  had  resigned.  “Bit  thick  for 
me,  ’  ’  he  said.  “  I  Ve  known  some  of  those  Russian 
chaps  to  get  up  in  the  morning,  remark  that  they 
needed  exercise  before  breakfast,  and  load  up  a 
brace  of  revolvers.  Then  I’d  hear  the  shots  go¬ 
ing,  out  by  the  prison  compound.  .  . 

In  Germany,  not  only  did  the  Spartacides  shoot 
up,  without  much  plan  or  method,  nearly  every 
city;  but  the  government  forces  put  down  these 
revolts  with  every  sign  of  relish  in  the  act  of  kill¬ 
ing.  No  episode  of  revolution  is  much  more  hor¬ 
rible  than  the  final  extinction  of  Spartacism  in 
Berlin.  Picked  up  on  the  streets,  often  condemned 
without  semblance  of  trial,  the  miserable  crea¬ 
tures  were  herded  by  hundreds  into  a  stone-walled 
prison  yard.  And  then — Germans  who  listened 
from  without  have  described  to  me  not  how  it 
looked,  for  none  witnessed  this  scene  except  vic¬ 
tims  and  executioners,  but  how  it  sounded.  First, 
a  wail  as  of  the  damned  in  agony  as  the  victims 
realized  what  was  going  to  happen.  Then  an  in¬ 
stant  of  pregnant  silence;  then  the  rattle  of  the 
machine  guns,  punctuated  with  moaning.  The 
guns  would  stop,  but  the  moaning  would  continue, 
showing  that  the  victims  were  not  all  dead.  From 


WHAT  DOES  IT  MATTER? 


103 


the  emplacements  on  the  walls  would  come 
raucous,  mirthless,  insane  laughter — and  the  guns 
would  rattle  again. 

Indeed,  Germany  as  I  saw  it  during  1920 
furnished  a  fine  laboratory  study  in  the  moral 
after-effects  of  war.  Here,  before  1914  State 
worship  had  its  most  revered  shrine.  The  average 
German  had  been  educated  to  believe  in  the  State 
with  a  soul,  whose  glory  and  good  ‘ 4  sweetened  all 
methods.’ ’  Though  the  atrocities  of  her  army 
have  been  exaggerated,  the  fact  remains  that  Ger¬ 
many  made  war  more  ruthlessly  than  any  of  her 
Western  enemies,  and  did  by  so  much  the  more 
surrender  the  ethics  of  Christ  to  those  of  Mars. 
One  would  expect,  therefore,  a  correspondingly 
greater  drop  in  personal  morals ;  and  exactly  that 
happened. 

Before  the  war,  Germans  were  famous  for  their 
commercial  honesty.  International  banking  firms, 
rating  “moral  risks”  by  nationalties,  placed  the 
British  first,  the  Germans  second.  If  this  honesty 
showed  here  and  there  conspicuous  flaws,  that  was 
part  of  the  faulty  German  system.  In  their  con¬ 
ception  of  public  policy,  foreign  commerce  ranked 
with  the  army,  the  navy  and  the  Kaiser  as  an 
integral  part  of  the  state  machine.  To  advance 
German  foreign  commerce  in  general  was  a  sacred 
duty ;  and  the  ‘ *  State  has  no  morals. 9  ’  Therefore, 


104 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


when  corruption  served  this  end,  German  trade 
agents  were  great  bribe  givers.  The  fact  that  they 
seldom  reversed  the  process  and  took  bribes  ap¬ 
proves  their  purely  personal  integrity.  Perhaps 
I  need  not  say  all  this  to  Americans ;  most  of  us 
know  the  Germans  among  us,  and  however  we 
may  dislike  their  imperfect  Americanism  we  have 
had  no  cause  to  doubt  their  personal  responsi¬ 
bility.  By  1920,  all  this  had  changed — in  the 
Fatherland  at  least.  While  the  working-class  dis¬ 
tricts  dragged  out  existence  on  turnips  and  potato 
bread,  a  loud,  vulgar,  ostentatious  class  held  high 
revel  in  the  great  cafes  of  Berlin.  Ask  any 
respectable  German  who  these  people  were,  and 
he  would  answer  with  a  shrug  of  his  shoulders 
schiebers  (grafters).  Some  of  this  gentry  made 
their  new  money  by  speculating  in  the  falling 
mark.  Most  of  them,  however,  battened  on  the 
weakness  of  the  new  Republic.  By  fraud,  chican¬ 
ery  and  corruption  they  exported  goods  which 
their  country  needed  in  order  to  rebuild  her  eco¬ 
nomic  life,  they  imported  forbidden  luxuries,  they 
dodged  tariffs  and  export  taxes.  And  this  gentry 
it  seemed  to  me,  set  the  pace  for  all  Berlin.  You 
could  get  nowhere  without  bribery.  Foreigners 
returning  after  the  war  to  do  business  with  former 
German  associates  found  that  the  old,  direct 
method  would  no  longer  serve.  To  get  anything 


WHAT  DOES  IT  MATTER? 


105 


done,  they  must  grease  a  dozen  eager  palms.  Tip¬ 
ping  a  subordinate  to  betray  his  employer  was  a 
proceeding  so  common  as  to  reach  the  status  of 
the  legitimate. 

Berlin,  like  Paris  and  London,  had  its  ‘ 4  pleasure 
districts”  before  the  war.  Which  assayed  lowest 
in  virtue,  none  can  say.  As  any  one  who  has  even 
scratched  the  surface  knows,  those  two  or  three 
square  miles  of  Paris  about  Montmartre  and  the 
Boulevards  do  not  in  any  way  represent  French 
life  or  even  Parisian  life.  No  more  did  the  cor¬ 
responding  district  represent  Berlin.  That  was 
only  an  ulcer,  famous  but  insignificant.  About  it, 
Germany  in  general  maintained  a  reasonable  de¬ 
gree  of  morality  and  propriety.  In  fact,  the  Ger¬ 
mans  were  even  a  trifle  conceited  in  their  virtue, 
pointing  to  their  large  families  as  proof  that  the 
clear  stream  of  German  purity  had  not  been  cor¬ 
rupted  through  its  contact  with  the  surrounding 
lesser  breeds. 

That,  too,  had  suffered  a  war  change.  On 
Unter  den  Linten  at  night,  women  of  the  street  in 
droves  assailed  the  pedestrian.  These  were  not 
painted  ladies,  either;  looks,  dress  and  manner 
betrayed  them  as  members  of  the  working  or 
clerical  class,  probably  employed  during  the  day. 
In  detail,  I  remember  still  a  woman  whom  I 
marked  one  night  outside  of  the  Hotel  Adlon.  She 


106 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


was  stodgy,  middle-aged,  motherly  and  respect¬ 
able  in  appearance ;  I  had  been  noting  with  amuse¬ 
ment  that  she  might  just  have  stepped  out  from 
a  sewing  circle  in  a  Western  town.  She  ap¬ 
proached — and  solicited  me.  Now  this  was  not 
a  period  of  unemployment.  Virtually  any  one  in 
Berlin  could  get  work.  However,  the  mark  had 
begun  its  antics,  and  wages  had  not  kept  pace  with 
the  rise  in  cost  of  living.  Everyone  wanted  a 
little  extra  money  for  more  food,  for  worn-out 
necessities  or  for  small  luxuries.  By  thousands, 
these  German  women  were  going  out  to  get  it  in 
the  old,  familiar  easiest  way.  “  Frankly/ ’  said  a 
shrewd  and  reliable  observer  of  his  countrymen, 
“we  don’t  go  out  in  Berlin  society  any  more.  It 
has  become  too  nasty  to  be  either  amusing  or 
stimulating.”  The  burgomaster  of  a  Rhine  village 
spoke  to  me  with  tears  in  his  eyes  concerning  the 
change  in  the  girls  of  his  town.  “We  were  so 
proud,  once,  of  their  virtue!  We  said,  ‘As  is  the 
lily  among  flowers,  so  is  the  Rhineland  girl 
among  women.’  And  now — I  couldn’t  show  you 
our  police  records.  Too  many  good  families 
would  be  ashamed  if  any  one  knew  some  of  the 
names.” 

Of  German  youth  and  its  moral  outlook,  Georg 
Brandes,  the  Danish  critic,  wrote  as  follows, 
in  1923 : 


WHAT  DOES  IT  MATTER? 


107 


As  Russia  will  soon  produce  nothing  but  sects,  so  does 
the  young  generation  of  Germany  produce  nothing  but 
revelings  .  .  .  they  are  dreaming  of  the  coming  of  a 
new  religion,  they  are  paying  homage  to  glib  and  empty- 
headed  prophets  .  .  .  they  cultivate  the  mysticism  of 
Asia  and  half-Asia.  .  .  .  Still  less  do  the  intellectual 
youths  begin  with  the  beginning,  as  should  be,  by  rein¬ 
stating  honesty  and  by  turning  against  the  desperately 
loose  morals,  against  shiftlessness,  theft,  fraud,  violence 
and  murder. 

Indeed,  if  you  want  proof  of  what  war  has  done 
to  our  generation,  look  around  you.  Will  any  one 
venture  to  maintain  that  the  world  obeys  the 
moral  law  in  1923  as  strictly  as  it  did  in  19131 
In  America,  it  is  true,  we  have  initiated  Prohibi¬ 
tion,  which  has  reduced  the  number  of  arrests  for 
minor  crime  and  disorders.  However,  the  pre¬ 
liminary  work  of  Prohibition  was  all  done  before 
we  took  up  arms ;  the  capstone  was  laid  as  a  mili¬ 
tary  measure  during  our  war.  War  or  no  war, 
the  Eighteenth  Amendment  would  have  come  just 
the  same.  For  the  rest — never  did  the  old- 
fashioned  moralists  of  any  age  view  with  such 
logical  alarm  the  ways  of  the  younger  generation. 
With  every  allowance  for  the  natural  tendencies 
of  a  middle-aged  man  to  deplore  new  things,  I 
cannot  find  this  alarm  wholly  unjustified.  I  real¬ 
ize  that  some  of  their  irreverence  is  but  tilting  at 
things  which  had  better  not  be  revered — the 


108 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


mealy-mouthed  hypocrisies  on  which  we  of  the 
Victorian  age  were  nourished  and  reared.  As 
they  look  at  me  with  their  clear  hut  sophisticated 
eyes,  they  seem  to  say:  “Well,  we’ve  taken  your 
world  as  we  found  it.  Your  generation  made  it. 
If  we  can’t  make  a  better  world.  ...”  I  should 
despair  of  life  did  I  not  think  that  they  will  arrive 
in  time  at  new  conceptions  of  morals  just  as  high 
as  the  ones  in  which  we  were  reared,  and  less 
blind.  But  whoever  denies  that  there  is  at  present 
more  old-fashioned  sin  in  the  new  generation  than 
in  the  last,  marks  himself  as  a  blind,  mid-Vic¬ 
torian  romanticist  or  an  incurable  optimist.  And 
does  any  one  doubt  that  this  brand  across  the  shin¬ 
ing  face  of  youth  is  a  scar  of  the  Great  WTar?  In 
the  heats  and  illusions  of  1918,  certain  enthusiasts 
visioned  a  world-wide  religious  revival.  It  has 
always  been  coming ;  but  it  has  never  arrived. 

Again  and  finally,  let  us  try  to  strike  the  moral 
balance.  For  war,  its  voluntary  sacrifices ;  against 
war,  its  hates,  now  perpetuated  to  last  through 
decades  and  even  centuries  of  peace,  its  ethical 
confusion  which  results  in  the  atrophy  of  com¬ 
mon  honesties,  decencies  and  purities ;  and  finally 
its  subtle  corruption  of  a  whole  rising  generation. 
Where,  now,  stands  the  balance?  Can  any  one 
with  clear  eyes  and  uncorrupted  soul  maintain 
that  it  favors  war! 


CHAPTER  VII 


THE  KINGDOM 

Now,  having  seen  that  war  lowers  the  morals 
and  weakens  the  spiritual  forces  of  the  generation 
which  wages  it  and  of  the  generation  that  follows, 
let  us  widen  the  scope  of  our  inquiry.  A  church 
as  a  working  organization  has  one  great  practical 
objective.  That  is  to  present  at  the  judgment 
seat  as  many  white  souls,  strong  souls,  saved 
souls,  as  it  possibly  can.  And  this  purification, 
strengthening  or  salvation  must  not  be  limited  to 
any  color  or  class ;  else  the  Church  had  disobeyed 
the  command,  4 ‘ preach  the  gospel  to  all  nations.’ ’ 
As  a  working  means  to  the  end,  any  church  under 
broad  leadership  concerns  itself  as  I  have  said 
before,  with  man’s  moral  environment.  Nor  does 
it  limit  its  concern  to  the  more  obvious  immoral 
influences,  such  as  vice-districts  and  gambling 
houses.  Just  as  strongly,  it  fights  poverty  and 
ignorance;  for  poverty  and  ignorance,  in  mass, 
weaken  and  sicken  the  better  part  of  man.  True, 
the  saints  and  recluses  of  the  Catholic  churches, 
the  missionaries  and  evangelists  of  the  Protestant 


109 


110 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


have  often  for  their  soul’s  salvation  given  all  they 
had  to  the  poor  and  gone  down  the  world  as 
paupers.  But  this  was  voluntary,  whereas  most  pov¬ 
erty  in  mass  is  wholly  involuntary.  The  strugglers 
of  the  slums  live  as  they  do,  not  because  they 
choose  but  because  they  must.  Now  foul,  crowded 
quarters  where  both  sexes  occupy  the  same  nar¬ 
row  rooms,  reeking  streets  where  children  play 
about  garbage  cans  and  bonfires,  dark  factories 
where  men,  women  and  children  work  all  their 
waking  hours  for  a  wage  which  scarcely  keeps 
soul  and  body  together — even  if  we  limit  our  con¬ 
ception  of  right  and  wrong  to  literal  interpreta¬ 
tion  of  the  Ten  Commandments,  such  conditions 
make  not  for  morality.  On  the  contrary,  both 
common  experience  and  police  statistics  prove 
that  the  slum  of  this  kind  is  the  breeding  ground 
for  impurity,  dishonesty,  crime. 

4 ‘Lead  us  not  into  temptation/ ,  prays  the 
Church.  Poverty  and  economic  degradation  are 
corporate  means  of  temptation.  Wherefore  the 
Church,  if  it  proposes  to  be  a  doer  of  the  word, 
not  a  mere  mumbler  of  empty  formulas,  must 
needs  concern  itself  with  poverty.  Any  pre¬ 
ventable  calamity  which  forces  great  masses  of 
population  below  the  decent  and  reasonable  stand¬ 
ard  of  living  should  become  at  once  the  legitimate 
concern  of  Christianity. 


THE  KINGDOM 


111 


There  is  a  viewpoint,  indeed,  higher  even  than 
that.  Upon  our  churches  has  been  dawning  a  per¬ 
ception  that  the  material  progress  of  the  past  cen¬ 
tury  is  not  wholly  a  material  matter ;  that,  some¬ 
how,  it  may  yet  serve  the  purposes  of  the  spirit. 
That  the  children  of  a  laboring  man  used  two  hun¬ 
dred  years  ago  to  go  barefoot,  whereas  now  they 
have  shoes,  is  not  in  itself  a  fact  with  which 
morals  and  theology  have  any  concern.  But,  save 
in  isolated  instances  where  some  industrial  baron 
holds  wicked  sway,  the  so-called  “working  class” 
possesses,  because  of  our  material  progress,  a 
host  of  spiritual  advantages  entirely  beyond  his 
grasp  three  centuries  ago.  For  example,  all  the 
best  literature  of  the  world,  all  the  highest  thought 
simplified  for  the  commonest  understanding,  is 
usually  his  for  the  asking.  He  can  read;  and 
steam,  electricity,  modern  chemistry  have  made 
books  cheaper  and  commoner  than  bread.  Any 
night,  you  may  sit  in  a  cafe  of  Lille  or  Dresden 
or  Prague  and  hear  men  with  horn-gloved  hands 
debating  on  the  philosophy  of  Kant,  the  music  of 
Wagner,  the  theories  of  Bergson.  Of  course,  not 
all  the  conversation  in  these  cafes  is  so  absorbed 
in  things  intellectual;  still,  it  would  compare 
favorably  with  the  talk  at  the  average  country 
club!  In  Brussels  stands  the  Maison  du  Peuple 
(House  of  the  People)  built  by  the  laboring  class. 


112 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


Its  beautiful  frescoes  are  the  work  of  painters 
risen  from  the  ranks  of  the  workers  and  by  them 
educated.  In  its  auditoriums  and  lecture  rooms 
one  may  for  a  few  pennies  witness  the  best 
modern  drama,  for  nothing  hear  expounded  the 
best  modern  learning.1  In  1916,  I  attended  the 
British  Trades  Union  Congress  at  Birmingham. 
They  who  took  the  floor  spoke  with  the  logic,  the 
orderly  arrangement,  the  background  of  informa¬ 
tion,  which  distinguished  the  educated  man — 
whether  that  education  has  been  obtained  at  a  uni¬ 
versity  or  at  a  pine-knot  blaze.  On  the  same 
occasion,  I  attended  several  ordinary  union  meet¬ 
ings.  The  speakers  here  were  lesser  men;  often 
their  accent  was  uncouth  and  their  grammar 
faulty ;  but  they  did  show  that  they  had  the  same 
sure  foundations  of  culture. 

Compare  these  modern  working  men  with  the 
“ unlettered  hinds”  of  feudal  times.  Certainly, 
the  hinds  had  the  Christian  religion.  Possibly,  as 
great  a  proportion  of  them  as  of  the  correspond¬ 
ing  class  to-day  knew  “salvation.”  Possibly — but 
not  probably,  I  think.  I  cannot  argue  the  case 
positively,  having  no  exact  facts  any  more  than 
have  my  opponents.  But  as  I  read  between  the 

1  This  institution  is  the  work  of  the  moderate  Belgian  Socialist 
party,  opposed  to  the  Belgian  Established  Church.  However,  the 
Catholic  Labor  party  has  similar  though  less  prosperous  institu¬ 
tions. 


THE  KINGDOM 


113 


lines  of  history,  I  seem  to  perceive  in  the  hind 
class  those  same  vices  of  poverty  which  breed  in 
our  own  degraded  slums — lechery,  festering  envy, 
small  spites,  violence.  It  is  a  significant  fact,  for 
example,  that  in  periods  of  hard  times  the  Kings 
of  France  and  England  festooned  every  cross¬ 
roads  with  hanging  bodies  of  serfs  and  varlets 
who  had  taken  to  highway  robbery. 

Yielding  this  point,  however,  admitting  that  the 
percentage  of  religion  and  of  its  concomitant 
simple  virtue  was  as  great  then  as  now,  more, 
much  more,  remains  to  be  said.  We  deck  our 
pulpits  and  lecterns  with  flowers;  we  burn  fine 
incense  at  our  altars ;  on  our  shrines  and  churches 
we  have  lavished  the  best  music,  painting,  sculp¬ 
ture,  building,  of  fifteen  centuries.  God  demands, 
and  the  believer  cheerfully  gives,  the  highest  ex¬ 
pression  of  the  human  spirit  in  art  and  thought. 
And  if  perfection  in  mere  stone  and  pigment  and 
fluting  reeds  be  an  acceptable  offering  to  God, 
how  much  more  must  be  perfection  and  transfor¬ 
mation  of  the  Vessel  of  the  Holy  Ghost — hu¬ 
manity  !  Which  better  serves  the  glory  of  God — 
men  who  believe  and  are  saved  through  belief, 
only  because  no  one  has  offered  them  any  choice, 
or  men  who  know  that  matter  is  composed  of 
electrons  and  atoms,  that  the  world  revolves 
through  space,  that  sickness  arises  not  from 


114 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


demoniac  possession  but  from  bacilli,  and  who, 
knowing  all  this,  still  believe  ?  "Which  is  the  more 
exalted  sacrifice  to  God— an  ignorant  mind  or  a 
mind  developed  up  to  the  limit  of  its  powers?  I 
cannot  question  but  that  in  opening  the  wisdom 
and  beauty  of  this  world  to  the  average,  common 
man,  we  are  serving  the  highest.  If  this  is  not 
so,  let  us  logically  strip  the  ornaments  from  our 
altars,  smash  the  stained  glass  in  our  windows, 
and  worship  again  in  stables  or  catacombs. 
Beauties  of  wood  and  stone  and  pigment  will  not 
avail  us  if  we  deny  God  the  beauties  of  the  spirit. 

Indeed,  this  conception  widens  until  it  em¬ 
braces  our  planet  as  a  whole  and  all  that  exists 
upon  it.  If  the  Judgment  came  to-morrow,  which 
would  be  the  better  offering  to  the  Fires  of  the 
Eternal — a  world  of  slums  and  hovels,  starvation 
and  wretchedness,  or  one  of  gardens  and  blossom¬ 
ing  stones,  of  plenty  and  righteous  happiness? 
Creating  that  world  is  man’s  practical  application 
of  the  prayer,  ‘  ‘  Thy  Kingdom  come, 9 1  and  in  this 
view  the  material  blends  insensibly  with  the 
spiritual.  Our  burst  of  production  in  the  nine¬ 
teenth  and  twentieth  centuries,  whatever  its  in¬ 
justices  here  and  there,  makes  toward  fulfillment 
of  the  Kingdom.  Some  day,  when  we  have 
mounted  up  still  more  machinery  for  the  service 
of  man,  have  brought  under  control  of  law  and 


THE  KINGDOM 


115 


democracy  our  surplus  of  goods,  we  may  abolish 
undue  degrading  poverty  and  undue  corrupting 
wealth,  may  give  all  men  the  security  and  leisure 
to  cultivate  the  things  of  the  spirit.  It  need  not 
be,  it  will  not  be,  either  a  Godless  world  nor  yet 
a  “soft  world.”  Our  faith  is  indeed  frail  if  we 
do  not  believe  that  in  all  the  voyages  of  the  human 
mind  into  the  structure  of  the  universe,  it  will 
still  find  at  the  end  the  incontrovertible  fact  of 
God.  As  for  softness,  one  who  has  known  many 
people  and  many  peoples  both  in  peace  and  war 
must  perceive  that  the  ideal  world  can  never  elimi¬ 
nate,  even  though  it  try,  the  factors  making  for 
spiritual  discipline.  Until  the  millennium,  we  shall 
not  dispense  with  death.  Still  in  our  youth  we 
must  behold  the  tearful  mystery  of  our  forebears 
sailing  out  into  the  peaceful  ocean  of  unnumbered 
souls.  Still,  as  approaching  age  dusts  our  hairs, 
we  must  see  old  friends  begin  to  drop  out  one 
by  one.  Still  from  plastic  childhood  to  molded 
age  we  must  control  our  lusts,  our  greeds,  our 
great  and  small  unkindnesses.  Still  must  we  go 
through  the  rigid  self-discipline  of  applying  our¬ 
selves  to  the  day’s  task.  Extreme  poverty,  of 
which  so  much  romantic  nonsense  has  been  writ¬ 
ten  by  people  who  never  knew  it,  is  no  ideal 
hardener  of  souls,  any  more  than  is  war.  More 
often,  in  my  observation,  it  crushes  souls. 


116 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


The  science  of  mathematics,  carried  far  enough, 
turns  a  complete  circle  and  blends  with  mysticism. 
Just  so,  when  Christianity  is  conceived  and  prac¬ 
ticed  largely  and  broadly,  it  takes  into  its  scope 
what  some  poet  has  called  the  dismal  science  of 
economics.  Wealth  and  the  processes  by  which 
it  is  created  become  a  matter  of  vital  interest  to 
the  Church.  Indeed,  this  is  only  pouring  old  wine 
into  new  bottles.  The  Judean-born  religions  al¬ 
ways  concerned  themselves  with  the  just  and 
orderly  distribution  of  wealth ;  else  the  Command¬ 
ment  ‘ 4 Thou  shalt  not  steal’ ’  had  not  figured  in 
the  Decalogue. 


CHAPTER  VIII 


WAR  CEASES  TO  PAY 

How  does  war  fit  in  with  this  material  aim  of 
Christianity,  this  creation  of  the  Lord’s  Garden? 
The  question,  it  seems  to  me,  should  answer  itself 
in  the  mind  of  any  reader  who  has  followed  events 
since  the  Armistice  of  1918.  Once,  when  the 
world  was  sparsely  populated  and  the  raw  ma¬ 
terials  of  production  plentiful,  war  often,  though 
not  invariably,  paid  the  victor.  Rome  at  the 
height  of  her  glory  was  so  rich  that  not  only 
did  her  nobles  dwell  in  palaces  furnished  with 
every  luxury  known  to  the  age,  but  hordes  of  the 
populace  lived  and  amused  themselves  without 
labor  on  bread  and  circuses  furnished  by  her  sur¬ 
plus  wealth.  All  this  she  gained  not  by  industry 
nor  invention,  but  by  the  power  of  the  Roman 
short  sword.  Anomalously,  war  sometimes 
worked  to  the  economic  benefit  of  both  victor  and 
vanquished.  Rome  found  the  Gauls  using  bronze 
for  tools  and  weapons;  she  gave  them  steel. 
Working  at  first  as  serfs,  the  native  Celts  learned 
from  Roman  foremen  their  more  expert  methods 


117 


118 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


of  production.  A  century  after  Rome  took  over 
Gaul,  the  natives,  though  they  had  yielded  up  their 
liberty,  had  improved  their  economic  status,  were 
producing  more  current  wealth  than  they  would 
have  done  in  many  centuries  had  the  Roman  left 
them  alone. 

However  after  the  Renaissance,  when  we  began 
building  the  modern  world  structure,  the  law  that 
warfare  paid  the  victor  constantly  applied  less 
and  less.  Finally  the  Great  War,  which  proved 
so  many  things  hitherto  only  suspected,  estab¬ 
lished  the  law  that  the  trial  of  battle  no  longer 
pays  any  one.  Taking  the  vanquished  first, 
Austria  and  Germany  lost.  Austria  was  dismem¬ 
bered.  After  five  years  of  close  living  under  war 
conditions,  the  central  part  which  gave  its  name 
to  the  old  empire  endured  five  years  more  of  slow 
starvation.  From  this  period  she  emerged  wan 
and  weakened,  to  a  grinding  poverty  which  will 
envelop  that  last  surviving  Austrian  who  remem¬ 
bers  the  Great  War.  The  subsidiary  nations  of 
Austria,  liberated  though  they  may  be,  will  fare 
in  our  lifetime  but  little  better.  Germany  for  a 
while  maintained  a  false  facade  of  good  times 
which  fooled  no  competent  observer.  Whatever 
be  the  outcome  of  the  reparations  question,  Ger¬ 
many,  before  1914  the  most  prosperous  and  crea¬ 
tive  nation  of  Western  Europe,  will  during  all 


WAR  CEASES  TO  PAY 


119 


our  lives  have  her  nose  close  to  the  grindstone. 
She  may — I  grant  this  to  the  French  chauvinist 
— yet  win  a  comparative  victory.  If  France  must 
continue  to  maintain  a  large  army  for  the  collec¬ 
tion  of  reparations  while  Germany  goes  unarmed, 
then  Germany  is  the  relative  economic  winner. 
But  by  no  possibility  will  she  win  in  the  absolute. 
None  can  conceive  a  turn  of  events  by  which  Ger¬ 
many  in  1960  or  1975  will  be  as  rich  as  she  would 
have  been  but  for  her  adventure  of  1914. 

As  for  the  victors :  Great  Britain  is  par  excel¬ 
lence  an  industrial  state,  as  in  slightly  lesser  de¬ 
gree  is  Germany.  Except  for  coal,  she  produces 
virtually  no  raw  material.  A  nation  in  that  situa¬ 
tion  lives  by  its  export  trade.  Now  Germany,  to¬ 
gether  with  her  subsidiary  nations,  was  Britain’s 
best  customer.  A  ruined  Germany,  Britons  have 
found  in  the  sober  afterthought  of  war,  means  a 
crippled  England.  And  she  is  crippled ;  her  slums, 
into  which  the  hectic  fires  of  war  threw  a  few 
impermanent  glints  of  light,  have  become  dark 
again.  If  Germany  does  not  make  reasonable  re¬ 
covery,  England  must  send  out  to  her  colonies  or 
to  foreign  lands  those  surplus  millions  who  now 
beg  in  all  her  streets.  Even  if  Germany  fares  as 
well  as  any  one  may  expect,  Great  Britain  too 
must  know  her  generation  of  poverty. 

France,  on  the  surface  most  prosperous  of  the 


120 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


Allied  Nations,  is  still  the  most  perplexed.  The 
explosions  and  fires  of  war  destroyed  more  prop¬ 
erty  in  her  North  than  any  detached  observer 
expects  Germany  ever  to  rebuild.  Her  war  debt 
has  mortgaged  every  material  object  in  France, 
from  a  shoestring  to  a  railroad,  up  to  more  than 
fifty  per  cent  of  its  value.  She  won  back  from 
Germany  the  Lorraine  iron  mines,  which  are 
virtually  useless  without  German  coal;  her  sole 
advantage  here,  in  case  the  territorial  situation 
remains  stable,  will  be  participation  in  European 
steel  profits.  It  will  not  be  enough,  by  many  and 
many  a  billion,  to  wipe  out  her  war  debts.  France 
invaded  the  Ruhr  coal  basin,  where,  as  things 
stand  at  present,  she  sits  holding  a  wildcat  by  the 
tail  and  knowing  not  how  to  let  go. 

Let  us  imagine  an  extreme  event — that  France 
stays,  annexes  the  Ruhr  with  all  its  property,  and 
now  owns  in  fee  simple  as  Germany  did  before 
1914  both  the  coal  and  iron  resources  of  West- 
Central  Europe.  First,  owing  to  technical  and 
political  reasons  too  long  for  review  here,  the 
transfer  of  ownership  and  exploitation  involves 
so  much  trouble  and  expense  that  the  French 
might  more  cheaply  open  an  unimproved  coal 
field — if  they  had  one.  Second,  during  all  the 
years  of  the  readjustment  she  must  maintain  an 
army  of  occupation  costing  hundreds  of  millions 


WAR  CEASES  TO  PAY 


121 


a  year.  Let  ns  suppose,  however,  that  she  accom¬ 
plishes  all  this  without  collapse.  Probably,  she 
can  never  use  this  coal  and  iron  so  well  as  Ger¬ 
many.  She  has  not  the  population,  nor  the  special 
talent  for  mass  production  of  cheap,  basic  com¬ 
modities.  Still,  at  best,  she  may  assume  some 
such  position  toward  Britain  as  Germany  held 
before  the  war.  What  then?  Her  best  foreign 
market,  like  Great  Britain’s,  has  hitherto  lain 
among  the  Germanic  peoples.  Before  the  Great 
War,  Germany  furnished  most  of  the  common, 
coarse  articles  used  in  France.  In  return,  France 
sent  into  Germany  those  finer  goods  which  the 
Germans  could  not  imitate.  In  any  manufactur¬ 
ing  that  requires  art  plus  industry,  France  holds 
a  natural  monopoly.  No  nation  has  ever  been 
able  to  compete  with  her  in  such  items  as  per¬ 
fumes,  brocaded  silks,  the  finer  grades  of  kid 
gloves,  and — this  is  almost  axiomatic — women’s 
gowns  of  the  better  and  more  beautiful  sort. 
These  are  luxuries.  The  nation  which  buys  them 
must  needs  be  prosperous.  Take  away  both  the 
coal  which  belongs  to  Germany  and  the  iron  ore 
which  she  stole  in  1871,  and  Germany  in  mass  can¬ 
not  buy  luxuries.  The  best  and  most  enduring 
industries  of  France  would  find  themselves  in  the 
position  of  a  merchant  who  had  stocked  his  shop 
with  exquisite  goods  and  then  alienated  his  best 


122 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


customers.  France  would  be  in  much  the  same 
quandary  as  Great  Britain.  The  time  might  come, 
after  perhaps  a  generation,  when  France  traded 
places  with  Germany  in  the  European  economic 
scheme — became  the  best  customer  of  England, 
exchanged  her  heavy,  coarse,  steel  products  for 
the  products  of  some  new  special  industries  de¬ 
veloped  in  Germany.  But  the  expense  of  such  a 
change  would  be  almost  as  staggering  as  the  ex¬ 
pense  of  the  Great  War.  And  having  accom¬ 
plished  this  shift,  France  would  probably  run  the 
same  course  as  Germany — bloated  prosperity,  the 
vices  of  the  spirit  bred  of  conquest,  and  then  the 
great  downfall. 

I  have  been  proving  the  obvious,  perhaps.  Only 
a  few  reactionaries — of  whom,  unhappily,  these 
United  States  have  their  due  share — are  so  sod- 
denly  blind  as  to  believe,  after  the  experience  of 
1914-1918,  that  war  between  closely  populated, 
intensively  organized  nations  can  any  more  be 
made  to  pay. 

The  causes  of  this  change  in  the  economic  bear¬ 
ing  of  warfare  on  society  are  not  perhaps  so 
obvious  or  so  generally  understood.  Why  did  war 
usually  pay  Rome,  the  Frankish  Kingdom,  even 
Spain  of  the  Philips,  where  now  it  cannot  pay 
Great  Britain  or  France  or  Germany?  There  are 
three  main  reasons. 


WAR  CEASES  TO  PAY 


123 


First  is  the  enormous  cost,  in  proportion  to 
national  resources  and  current  production,  of 
equipping  and  conducting  modern  armies.  Up  to 
the  period  of  preparation  for  the  Great  War,  the 
art  and  science  of  killing  men  had  scarcely  bene¬ 
fited  at  all  from  the  great  hurst  of  scientific  and 
industrial  energy  which  marked  the  nineteenth 
Century.  But  the  intensity  of  preparation  be¬ 
tween  1870  and  1914,  and  still  more  the  intensity 
of  the  struggle  once  battle  was  on,  gave  an 
enormous  impulse  to  the  invention  and  device  of 
tools  for  killing  and  of  auxiliaries  to  those  tools. 
Speaking  loosely  but  not  with  entire  inaccuracy, 
when  we  entered  this  period  we  were,  as  regards 
the  munitionments  and  mechanical  auxiliaries  of 
warfare,  in  the  era  of  hand  labor;  when  we  left 
it,  we  were  far  into  the  era  of  machine  labor. 
Now,  of  course,  the  initial  cost  of  a  machine  is 
much  greater  than  that  of  a  mere  tool.  In  the 
world  of  industry,  however,  the  machine  brings 
back  its  initial  cost  and  much  more  by  turning 
out  more  goods,  creating  more  wealth.  But  any 
instrument  which  we  make  for  war  is  not  a  means 
of  production  but  only  of  destruction  and  con¬ 
sumption  ;  not  a  working  machine  but  only  an  eat¬ 
ing  machine.  The  absolute  cost  of  equipping, 
arming  and  supplying  the  soldier  or  sailor  has 
with  every  big  invention  increased  in  a  proportion 


124 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


roughly  like  geometrical  progression ;  even  taken 
in  relation  to  the  resources  and  current  wealth 
of  the  country,  it  has  increased  in  arithmetical 
progression.  Further,  the  number  of  men  en¬ 
gaged  in  proportion  to  the  man  power  of  the 
nation  has  increased  steadily  toward  the  limit  of 
possibility.  Some  historical  statistician  who 
wishes  to  do  a  real  service  for  peace  will  one  day 
compute  for  us  the  relative  cost — in  that  real  unit 
of  value,  the  day’s  work — of  maintaining  a  soldier 
at  the  front  during,  say,  the  wars  of  Marlborough, 
the  Napoleonic  wars,  and  finally  the  Great  War. 
Going  further  he  will  compute  or  estimate  the 
comparative  cost  of  wars  and  preparation  for 
wars  in  proportion  to  current  national  production. 
Without  anticipating  his  results  by  any  guesses 
of  my  own,  I  feel  sure  that  when  he  plots  his 
curves  he  will  find  a  sharp  upward  tendency  which 
will  become  like  an  Alpine  peak  as  it  reaches  the 
three  decades  just  past.  If  we  maintain  this  habit 
of  war,  that  curve  will  rise  higher  still. 

Second  among  the  causes  for  the  decline  in  the 
profits  of  war  is  the  increased  destructiveness  of 
modern  weaponry.  Hand  in  hand  with  this  goes 
a  method  of  barbaric  warfare  abolished  by  the 
Code  of  Civilized  Warfare  but  revived  when  that 
code  broke  down — destroying  your  enemy’s  prop¬ 
erty  not  only  for  war  purposes  but  for  peace  pur- 


WAR  CEASES  TO  PAY 


125 


poses.  Man’s  progress  in  this  world  consists 
mainly  in  transforming  natural  forces.  Our 
civilization  is  a  struggle  with  nature — not  so  much 
to  balk  her  forces  as  to  lift  her  works  artificially 
to  a  higher  level  of  use.  But  Nature  still  holds 
her  fortress;  do  we  but  relax  our  vigilance,  she 
sallies  forth  and  overwhelms  us.  When  we  render 
our  complex  inventions  back  to  Nature,  she  re¬ 
solves  then  not  into  the  form  in  which  we  took 
them  from  her,  but  into  their  elements,  ready  for 
her  own  re-creation.  It  is  therefore  infinitely 
easier  to  destroy  the  works  of  man  than  to  create 
them.  The  house  in  which  I  write  was  built  a 
hundred  years  ago.  Its  erection  took  many  men 
many  weeks  of  labor.  Much  more  labor,  in  the 
course  of  a  century,  has  gone  into  the  business  of 
upkeep — maintaining  its  original  soundness. 
With  no  more  effort  than  lighting  a  match  and 
touching  off  the  pile  of  dry  wood  in  the  cellar, 
I  could  resolve  it  within  an  hour  into  smoke,  ashes, 
shapeless  masses  of  stone. 

During  the  past  three  centuries  of  unprece¬ 
dented  invention  and  mental  energy,  we  as  a  race 
have  been  much  more  interested  in  building  than 
in  destroying.  That  is  one  reason  why  the  devices 
of  warfare  have  been  until  recently  so  inferior 
to  the  devices  of  production.  Yet  even  the  com¬ 
paratively  primitive  weaponry  with  which  we 


126 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


entered  the  Great  War  showed  astonishing  pos¬ 
sibilities  of  physical  destruction.  Schoolhouses, 
town  halls,  churches,  were  destroyed  in  a  flash  by 
one  shot  fired  from  twenty  miles  away.  Never 
in  the  previous  history  of  warfare  was  the  very 
land,  which  is  the  foundation  of  all  wealth,  spoiled 
for  the  uses  of  man.  But  great  areas  of  Belgium 
and  Northern  France,  by  the  blowing  away  of  the 
top  soil  and  the  chemical  transformation  of  poison 
gas,  were  put  out  of  production  for  a  generation* 

The  Great  War  merely  started  us  to  thinking 
on  the  higher  mechanical  possibilities  of  destruc¬ 
tion.  Since  the  Armistice,  the  work  in  the  Devil’s 
laboratories  has  gone  merrily  on.  Until  recently, 
I  had  supposed  that  explosives  as  a  method  of 
warfare  were  going  a  little  out  of  date.  Other 
mechanical  and  chemical  means,  conspicuously 
poison  gas,  electricity  and  disease-bearing  bacilli 
seemed  to  offer  more  sinister  possibilities.  I  had 
supposed  that  explosive,  which  drove  out  the  bow 
and  arrow,  was  in  turn  giving  way  to  a  superior 
machinery  of  death. 

However,  the  reliable  and  credible  Lord  Robert 
Cecil,  in  his  tour  of  America  for  the  League  of 
Nations,  dropped  a  piece  of  news  whose  impor¬ 
tance  generally  escaped  attention.  He  spoke  of  a 
new  discovery  in  explosives  by  which  the  power 
of  bombs  has  been  increased  one  hundred  times . 


WAR  CEASES  TO  PAY 


127 


I  have  seen  a  whole  block  of  stone  buildings  an¬ 
nihilated  by  one  hit  from  a  raiding  aeroplane.  A 
bomb  with  one  hundred  times  as  much  power 
would  blow  into  powder  a  whole  district  of  a  great 
city.  Two  or  three  squadrons  attacking  in  waves 
could  make  a  junk  pile  of  Manhattan  Island. 

Destruction  of  property  without  obvious  mili¬ 
tary  reason  was,  I  repeat,  barred  by  the  Code. 
But  where  is  the  Code  now?  Since  chivalry  broke 
down  and  the  Church  of  Christ  found  itself  a 
bound  captive  in  the  train  of  Mars,  no  one,  save 
here  and  there  a  weak,  insincere  apologist  for 
militarism,  even  refers  to  the  Code  as  a  living 
force.  The  Germans,  in  a  rather  hesitant  fashion, 
showed  the  way.  As  soon  as  they  held  secure 
possession  of  Lens,  from  whose  rich  veins  France 
drew  more  than  half  of  her  native  coal,  they 
“drowned  out”  the  mines.  This  process  was 
very  simple  and  effective.  They  simply  turned 
streams  of  water  into  the  mouths  of  the  shafts, 
making  such  a  morass  and  mess  below  ground  that 
to  reopen  the  properties  would  take  more  time, 
cost  more  money,  than  the  veins  were  worth.  The 
German  government  defended  this  action  as  a 
“purely  military  measure.” 

Now  I  knew  that  Lens  front  while  the  fighting 
was  on  it,  and  have  since  the  Armistice  made  a 
pretty  thorough  inspection  of  the  ruined  mines. 


128 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


And  I  have  convinced  myself  that  the  purpose 
behind  this  destruction  was  not  military  at  all, 
but  economic.  If  they  were  thinking  in  purely 
military  terms,  the  Germans  had  but  to  run  water 
connections  up  to  the  mouths  of  the  shafts  and, 
at  the  moment  when  a  French  attack  looked 
dangerous,  turn  on  the  water.  The  mines  would 
have  been  destroyed  before  the  French  could  have 
saved  them.  No,  Germany  saw  that  here  was  a 
chance  to  cripple  a  rival ;  make  her,  when  the  war 
was  done,  a  commercial  vassal.  And  so  well  have 
we  incorporated  this  principle  into  our  militaristic 
and  nationalistic  thought  that  certain  French 
extremists  in  1923  advocated  similar  tactics  on 
an  enormous  scale.  The  6 ‘security  of  France”  is 
the  keynote  of  the  European  situation.  Few 
Frenchmen,  remembering  the  horrors  and  humi¬ 
liations  of  1870  and  1914,  believe  that  Germany 
can  be  anything  but  a  bitter  enemy,  waiting  to 
pounce  upon  them.  Germany  has  more  than  sixty 
million  inhabitants  with  a  rising  birth  rate ; 
France  less  than  forty  million  with  a  declining 
birth  rate.  Germany  has  the  best  coal  veins  in 
Europe ;  France  has  little  native  fuel.  The 
guaranties  against  German  aggression  adopted  or 
proposed  at  the  Versailles  Conference  have  fallen 
away  from  France  one  by  one.  So  Frenchmen  of 
the  old  school  see  no  security  but  nibbling  into 


WAR  CEASES  TO  PAY 


129 


Germany.  This,  not  reparations,  has  motived 
most  French  diplomacy  since  the  Armistice.  As 
I  write  this  she  holds  the  Ruhr,  Germany’s  great¬ 
est  coal-mining  and  steel-making  district.  And 
among  themselves,  some  of  her  highest-placed 
soldiers  and  statesmen  now  discuss  the  policy  of 
destroying  the  industrial  Ruhr — flooding  out  the 
mines,  burning  the  great  steel  plants  such  as 
Krupp’s  and  Thyssen’s.1  All  this  they  propose 
in  a  period  of  nominal  peace,  and  solely  in  order 
to  cripple  the  resources  of  a  potential  enemy.  The 
present  trend  of  military  thought  runs  contrary 
to  the  spirit  of  chivalry.  In  any  future  war,  the 
destruction  of  the  enemy’s  property  in  order 
permanently  to  weaken  him  will  enter  into  the 
plan  of  strategy.  It  seems  that  you  cannot  make 
an  economist  out  of  the  average  soldier,  no  mat¬ 
ter  how  great.  A  specialist  of  rather  a  narrow 
order,  he  usually  fails  in  any  attempt  to  weigh 
social  and  economic  factors  or  to  read  politics  in 
any  language  except  that  of  force.  In  war, 
soldiers  or  those  who  see  only  level  with  soldiers 
hold  control  of  nations.  These  people  cannot 
understand  that  to  destroy  or  reduce  the  produc¬ 
tive  capacity  of  any  nation  is  to  destroy  or  reduce 
its  purchasing  capacity ;  that  to  win  a  war 


1  This  view,  let  me  say  in  all  fairness,  does  not  express  the 
general  public  opinion  of  France. 


130 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


on  these  terms  means  eventually  the  dwindling 
of  your  own  markets  and  the  injury  oT  your 
own  prosperity.  Then,  too,  these  people,  like 
the  nation  behind  them,  will  be  in  a  state  of  war- 
psychosis.  Destruction  of  the  enemy  and  all 
things  that  are  his  will  appear  righteous  and 
natural.  They  will  be  no  more  capable  of  reason¬ 
ing  facts  to  a  sober  conclusion  than  a  council  of 
lunatics. 

If  her  small  clique  of  militant  reactionaries 
should  ever  get  control  in  France,  and  should 
carry  out  the  plan  to  destroy  the  Ruhr  district, 
they  might  conceivably  win  security  for  France. 
But  the  partial  destruction  of  Germany’s  power 
to  buy  from  them  would  tend  to  leave  France 
poorer.  And  at  this  moment  we  are  dealing  only 
with  the  question  whether  modem  war  pays  in 
dollars  and  cents. 

This,  the  second  factor  working  in  the  modem 
world  to  make  war  commercially  unprofitable, 
blends  with  the  third — the  increasing  size  and 
complexity  of  the  world  machine.  Drop  a  hairpin 
into  the  small,  simple  mechanism  of  a  grindstone 
and  you  do  no  harm.  Drop  it  into  certain  parts 
of  a  big  electric  dynamo,  and  you  may  blow  up 
a  whole  power  line.  When  the  Romans  con¬ 
quered  a  barbarian  tribe  and  consolidated  it  into 
a  province,  they  were  dealing  with  a  self-sufficient 


WAR  CEASES  TO  PAY 


131 


people.  To  the  Gauls  of  200  b.cv  a  blockade  of 
their  borders  meant  nothing.  Their  fields  raised 
and  their  hands  wrought  everything  they  needed. 
Conversely,  any  destruction  of  fields  or  buildings 
or  “human  material”  in  Gaul  meant  little  to  the 
general  prosperity  of  Rome. 

With  the  growth  of  nations  and  the  improve¬ 
ment  of  transportation,  that  gradually  changed. 
By  the  end  of  medieval  times,  certain  corners  of 
the  world,  like  the  old  Venetian  Republic,  did  feel 
often  the  fluctuations  in  values  and  the  loss  of 
purchasing  power  caused  by  wars  of  other  nations. 
And  still,  it  counted  but  little  on  the  whole.  Until 
well  into  the  modern  era,  most  of  the  European 
nations  felt  only  slightly  the  reduced  production 
of  others.  The  great  trade  routes,  like  that  chain 
which  ran  from  Bruges  to  the  Indies,  carried 
mainly  such  luxuries  as  silks,  jewels  and  spices; 
and  few  could  afford  luxuries  in  those  days. 
Wool,  raw  or  manufactured,  was  almost  the  only 
standard  commodity  customarily  imported  and 
exported. 

We  changed  all  that  in  the  nineteenth  century, 
especially  in  its  latter  half.  We  built  up  by  in¬ 
sensible  degrees  the  mighty,  complex  structure 
of  international  trade,  international  credits  and 
finance.  It  took  the  late  war  and  its  aftermath 
to  show  us  how  complex  we  had  made  our  world 


132 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


machinery.  In  1861-1865  these  United  States 
fought  our  great  Civil  War;  in  1870,  Germany 
fought  France.  Then  the  United  States  was  not 
as  yet  an  industrial  nation.  Our  part  in  the  in¬ 
ternational  scheme  was  the  production  of  raw 
materials  such  as  cotton  and  foodstuffs.  At  that, 
the  blight  on  production  of  southern  cotton 
brought  woe  to  the  Lancashire  weavers;  but  still 
the  Civil  War  disturbed  world  industry  compara¬ 
tively  little.  Neither  France  nor  Germany  had 
in  1870  fully  entered  the  industrial  era.  They 
were  still  agricultural  nations,  nearly  self-suffi¬ 
cient.  Their  war  too,  intense  as  it  was  while  it 
lasted,  did  not  much  embarrass  the  surrounding 
nations.  Germany,  for  a  generation  at  least,  made 
the  French  War  pay.  Perhaps  it  will  be  written 
down  in  history  as  the  last  instance  of  the  kind. 
This,  I  have  always  believed,  was  mostly  accident. 
In  taking  over  Alsace-Lorraine,  the  German 
jingo  thought  not  of  the  Lorraine  iron  fields  but 
of  “historical”  and  dynastic  claims.  They  did 
not  yet  appreciate  the  fullness  of  their  native 
wealth  in  coal  nor  the  astonishing  results  which 
would  follow  from  the  marriage  of  Ruhr  power 
and  Lorraine  raw  material.  At  that,  this  mili¬ 
taristic  theft,  while  it  gave  unparalleled  pros¬ 
perity,  was  perhaps  the  cause  of  Germany’s  de¬ 
struction.  What  the  Germans  gained  by  the 


WAR  CEASES  TO  PAY 


133 


sword  they  must  keep  by  the  sword.  Their  in¬ 
tense,  super-efficient  military  preparation  passed 
from  the  defensive  attitude  to  the  offensive,  gen¬ 
erated  the  madness  of  1914;  and  the  end  of  that 
nation  was  worse  than  its  beginning. 

Forty-four  years  elapsed.  The  sword  of  the 
World  War  slashed  through  the  new  improved 
world  structure,  so  that  we  could  study  it  in  cross- 
section.  We  found  within  a  month  that  Belgium, 
shut  off  by  land  and  sea,  must  be  fed  by  neutral 
charity  or  she  would  starve.  Belgium  was  the 
most  densely  populated  nation,  in  manufactured 
goods  the  most  productive  for  her  population,  in 
all  Europe.  She  raised  less  than  seventy  per  cent 
of  her  own  foodstuffs.  Great  Britain  was  from 
the  beginning  in  much  the  same  quandary;  when, 
in  1917,  the  intensive  submarine  campaign 
threatened  to  blockade  her  coasts,  she  acknowl¬ 
edged  that  two  years  ot  such  conditions  would 
finish  her. 

However,  this  situation  may  best  be  studied 
in  the  neutral  nations  where  hectic,  unnatural 
activity  in  munitions  manufacture  did  not  com¬ 
plicate  the  situation,  conceal  the  true  nature  of 
war  prosperity.  Spain  is  the  most  important 
European  nation  which  remained  unaffected  by 
the  war.  Down  in  her  southeastern  corner  lies 
Catalonia,  centering  round  the  industrial  city  of 


134 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


Barcelona.  To  this  one  district  came  sudden  pros¬ 
perity.  Her  industrial  magnates  made  a  great 
deal  of  money  out  of  aeroplane  engines  and  uni¬ 
form  cloth.  Even  the  working  class  prospered 
mightily — for  a  time.  With  the  end  of  the  war 
came  a  slump;  even  Catalonia,  calculating  her 
profits  over  a  period  of  ten  years,  did  not  profit 
by  the  war.  And  Catalonia  is  exceptional.  Gen¬ 
erally  speaking,  Spain  lingers  in  the  agricultural 
stage — which  makes  her  the  better  example.  Her 
most  valuable  exports  are  her  superb  horses  and 
mules,  and  her  semi-tropical  fruits.  With  the 
outbreak  of  war,  the  live  stock  market  soared. 
The  breeders  of  northern  Spain  sold  their  horses 
and  mules  to  the  Allies  at  bonanza  prices.  This 
went  on  until  the  native  breeding  stock  stood  in 
danger  of  depletion;  and  the  government  pro¬ 
hibited  the  exportation  of  animals.  The  breeders, 
before  the  war  was  over,  spent  all  their  easily 
gained  margins  and  more,  owing  to  the  rising 
price  of  imported  necessities.  As  for  the  South, 
whence  came  Spain’s  oranges,  lemons,  table 
grapes  and  sweet  wines — her  state,  precarious 
from  the  first,  became  tragic.  By  1917,  travelers 
along  the  roads  of  Andalusia  beheld  the  singular 
spectacle  of  men  begging  for  bread  under  trees 
which  were  dropping  over-ripe  oranges.  Man 
cannot  live  by  fruit  alone.  Spain  has  good  coal 


WAR  CEASES  TO  PAY 


135 


fields  which  she  had  neglected  to  develop.  There 
was  no  way  of  developing  them  in  the  existing 
circumstances.  Spain  does  not  produce,  and  could 
not  now  buy  abroad,  the  necessary  machinery. 
Great  Britain,  fuel  producer  of  the  Allies,  granted 
her  enough  coal  to  keep  the  war  industries  run¬ 
ning,  and  little  more.  Furnaces  shut  down  one 
by  one,  and  for  four  winters  the  population  of  the 
Castilian  plateau  shivered  with  cold. 

Switzerland  lives  somewhat  by  manufacture, 
but  more  by  hotel  keeping.  From  Central  France, 
Germany  or  Italy,  the  European  could  travel  to 
her  great  mountain  playgrounds  as  cheaply  and 
quickly  as  can  the  American  of  Ohio  to  the  resorts 
of  our  New  England  coast;  in  summer,  to  a  cer¬ 
tain  extent  in  winter,  she  played  host  to  a  floating 
population  numbered  by  millions.  That  is  one 
manifestation  of  our  increasing  complexity  and 
interdependence.  The  manufacturing  industries 
proceeded  irregularly.  Some  made  huge  profits ; 
some  shut  down.  The  hotels  failed  so  fast  that 
the  Swiss  courts  finally  shut  their  eyes  to  the 
bankruptcy  laws.  At  the  famous  resort  of  Griine- 
wald,  in  the  summer  of  1917,  I  was  one  of  ten 
guests  in  a  great  and  splendid  hotel.  No  other 
inn  of  any  consequence  had  even  tried  to  keep 
open.  A  scant  producer  of  any  essential  food¬ 
stuffs  except  dairy  products,  and  with  no  sea- 


136 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


coast  of  her  own,  Switzerland  was  forced  virtually 
to  beg  bread  of  the  Allies;  to  grant  them  snch 
favors  as  she  dared,  in  face  of  the  German 
menace,  for  wheat  and  potatoes.  In  1917,  I  saw 
half  of  Geneva’s  population  marching  in  proces¬ 
sion  and  yelling  as  they  marched  for  “  bread — 
bread — bread!”  Meanwhile,  neutral  though  she 
was,  she  must  needs  sustain  the  burden  of  an 
army  fully  mobilized  against  emergencies.  And 
for  the  remaining  neutrals  of  Europe,  such  as 
Holland  and  Scandinavia,  the  burden  of  other 
people’s  wars  was  even  heavier  and  more  lasting. 

The  Armistice,  of  course,  did  not  repair  the 
damaged  machine.  Rather,  it  gave  us  opportunity 
to  observe  what  war  does  to  the  complex  modern 
world  structure.  Of  this,  international  credit 
furnishes  perhaps  the  best  example.  Why  should 
a  German  factory  rust,  a  German  workman  go 
cold  and  hungry,  when  across  one  sea  are  the  raw 
materials  which  this  factory  uses-  crying  for 
markets,  and  across  another  sea  populations 
clamoring  for  the  finished  product?  Because 
foreign  exchange,  an  elaborate  structure  built  to 
bring  together  the  German  day’s  work,  the 
American  day’s  work,  the  Peruvian  day’s  work, 
has  been  knocked  all  askew  by  the  war. 

Now  this  disorganization,  with  its  heavy  ulti¬ 
mate  costs,  affects  both  victor  and  vanquished.  He 


WAR  CEASES  TO  PAY 


137 


who  wins  must  pay  for  the  repairs,  as  well  as  he 
who  loses.  The  increasing  interdependence  of  the 
world,  the  third  reason  and  at  present  perhaps 
the  least  for  the  decreasing  profits  in  victorious 
warfare,  is  bound  ever  to  become  more  important. 
Though  nations  new  and  old  have  gone  mad  with 
nationalism,  though  jingo  statesmen  still  poke 
sticks  into  the  machinery,  commerce,  science  and 
thought  go  serenely  on,  binding  the  parts  of  the 
world  into  a  tighter  and  more  complex  whole. 
Military  opinion  sets  the  probable  date  of  the 
next  general  war  about  thirty  years  from  the  end 
of  the  4 4 first  world  war” — say  1950.  By  then,  the 
nations  may  be  as  closely  joined  as  the  Siamese 
Twins — you  cannot  cut  the  bonds  which  unite 
them  without  killing  one  or  both. 

No,  so  far  as  highly  developed  peoples  are  con¬ 
cerned,  the  rule  is  established  and  proved;  war 
does  not  pay.  This,  however,  does  not  at  present 
apply  to  4 4 colonial  expeditions”  and  raids  on  the 
resources  of  backward  neighbors.  Some  of  these 
might  still  return  profits  on  the  investment.  For 
example,  a  small  but  earnest  group  of  powerful 
Americans  in  official  life  looks  forward  to  the  day 
when  we  shall  grab  Mexico.  Compared  to  such 
wars  as  we  waged  in  1917  and  1918,  that  would  be 
cheap  and  easy.  Mexico  lacks  the  means  to  create 
modern  equipment  on  an  adequate  scale.  Our 


138 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


navy,  virtually  without  opposition,  could  blockade 
her  coast  and  keep  out  foreign  supplies.  Her 
armies  know  only  a  kind  of  semi-guerrilla  war¬ 
fare,  very  irritating  to  oppose  but  not  in  the  end 
effective.  Finally,  she  has  only  fifteen  million 
people,  while  we  have  a  hundred  and  ten  million. 
Nor  would  the  transfer  of  ownership  in  Mexico 
much  affect  the  world  machine.  She  is  still  out 
of  the  main  industrial  and  commercial  currents. 
And  the  prize  of  victory  is  a  kingdom  of  unex¬ 
ploited  wealth  in  minerals,  oil,  rubber,  semi- 
tropical  products  generally.  South  of  Mexico  lie 
still  other  prizes,  almost  as  rich,  not  so  difficult 
of  acquirement.  To  provoke  and  carry  through  a 
war  of  conquest  on  Mexico  would  pay — at  least 
for  a  time. 

However,  this  modern  world  will  not  much 
longer  hold  out  such  a  temptation  to  greed  and 
violence.  Even  now  the  surplus  population  of 
Europe,  driven  forth  by  the  aftermath  of  war,  is 
flowing  to  Latin  America  as  once  it  flowed  to 
English  America.  In  the  century  between  1820 
and  1920,  our  population  grew  from  9,600,000  to 
105,000,000.  Nothing,  except  perhaps  an  exclu¬ 
siveness  which  grows  weaker  every  day,  stands 
to  prevent  Latin  America  from  making  some  such 
increase.  Wealth,  and  the  economic  means  of 
fighting  wars,  will  follow;  political  and  economic 


WAR  CEASES  TO  PAY 


139 


conditions  will  resemble  those  of  the  parent  con¬ 
tinent.  By  then,  opportunity  for  profitable  con¬ 
quest  will  have  vanished  in  the  Americas,  in 
Africa,  probably  in  Asia,  just  as  in  Europe ;  and 
the  new  economic  law  of  war  will  be  established 
the  world  over. 

Moral  reforms  all  tend  to  become  in  the  end 
economic  reforms.  A  small  band  of  far-seeing 
zealots  sees  that  the  thing  is  wrong;  later,  all 
mankind  sees  that  the  thing  is  foolish.  Then  the 
movement  begins  to  go  with  a  rush.  The  early 
Christians  manumitted  their  slaves  because  they 
felt  it  sacrilegious  to  buy  and  sell  a  human  soul. 
Yet  I  doubt  not  that  emancipation  became  general 
only  when  men  found  that  slave  labor  could  not, 
somehow,  compete  with  free  labor.  We  learned 
that  in  the  United  States,  as  any  one  knows  who 
has  studied  the  economic  causes  of  the  Civil  War. 
The  temperance  movement,  afterward  the  Pro¬ 
hibition  movement,  got  its  irresistible  headway 
only  when  our  people  realized  that  the  saloon 
bred  not  only  moral  degradation  but  economic 
loss.  As  religion  has  some  mystical  tie  with  ma¬ 
terial  advancement,  morals  with  effectiveness,  so 
among  the  forces  of  darkness  sin  ever  allies 
itself  with  folly.  When  the  higher  spirits  of 
civilization  understand  that  war  is  not  only  wicked 
but  imbecile,  we  shall  begin  to  make  progress 


140 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


toward  peace.  And,  for  reasons  upon  which  I 
have  been  expanding  in  the  past  two  chapters, 
its  folly,  its  opposition  to  the  creation  of  a  better 
material  world,  is  in  itself  the  legitimate  concern 
of  organized  Christianity  and  organized  Judaism. 


CHAPTER  IX 


THE  HUMAN  LOSS 

The  commonest  presentation  of  the  case  against 
war  consists  in  reviewing  its  purely  physical 
horrors — the  heaped-up  dead,  the  groans  of  the 
wounded  and  dying,  the  corrupted  human  flesh. 
And  this  somewhat  sensational  and  pictorial 
argument  is  also  at  bottom  a  trifle  illogical,  which 
is  perhaps  the  reason  why  such  masterful,  realis¬ 
tic  descriptions  of  war  as  Zola’s  La  Debacle ,  with 
its  picture  of  Sedan  on  the  night  of  the  great 
battle,  have  failed  of  their  purpose.  A  battle  is 
only  death  in  mass.  Were  I,  in  this  present  hour 
of  peace,  able  by  some  clairvoyance  to  witness  all 
the  contemporaneous  deathbed  scenes  the  world 
over,  and  by  some  flash  of  insight  beyond  my 
powers  to  weave  them  into  one  vivid  description, 
I  could  make  a  picture  as  repellent  as  Zola’s.  And 
I  could  use  it  as  an  argument  against  life  itself. 
Many  a  young,  adventurous  soldier  has  faced 
death  sustained  by  the  thought  that  if  it  happens 
now  it  will  come  in  a  flash,  not  after  the  long  toss¬ 
ings  of  sleepless  pillows;  and  that  it  will  come, 

141 


142 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


too,  before  life  has  grown  stale  to  his  taste.  If 
sudden  extinction  of  human  life  in  mass  were  all 
there  is  to  war,  then  religion  need  concern  itself 
merely  with  preparing  the  soldiers  for  a  good 
death. 

However,  this  does  not  even  begin  to  state  the 
case.  Since  one  object  of  a  broader  Christianity 
is  the  creation  of  the  Lord’s  Garden,  then  the 
character  of  the  humanity  which  inhabits  that 
place  of  delights  becomes  an  object  supremely  im¬ 
portant  to  the  Church.  It  is  possible,  and  that 
without  any  machinelike  system  of  socialized 
eugenics,  to  create  three  hundred  years  from  now 
a  human  race  vastly  superior  in  physique  and 
mentality  to  the  present  imperfect  species — a 
greater  percentage  of  genius  and  talent,  a  vastly 
superior  general  average.  It  is  equally  possible 
to  start  the  race  backward;  to  have,  three  hun¬ 
dred  years  from  now,  a  higher  percentage  of  men 
and  women  cursed  from  their  birth  by  the  physical 
handicaps  of  cancerous  cells,  imperfect  circula¬ 
tion,  defective  bones ;  and  by  the  mental  handicap, 
of  idiocy,  moronry,  neurosis,  defective  brains. 
Indeed,  this  question  allies  itself  closely  with  the 
very  plainest,  strictest  and  narrowest  morals.  On 
the  average,  sound  morals  as  well  as  sound  minds 
go  with  sound  bodies.  A  French  surgeon  with  an 
investigating  turn  of  mind  had  studied  before  the 


THE  HUMAN  LOSS 


143 


war  a  certain  class  of  moral  degenerates.  He 
followed  their  military  history,  and  found  that 
scarcely  one  had  stayed  in  the  army  a  year.  The 
hardships  of  the  trenches  brought  out  unsuspected 
flaws  in  physiological  structure.  They  broke 
down,  and  were  invalided  home. 

Science,  in  the  past  few  years,  has  discovered 
much  about  the  laws  of  animal  breeding,  and 
especially  human  breeding.  What  these  learned 
savants  of  laboratory  and  study  know  now,  the 
unlettered  savants  of  our  stock  farms  and  breed 
kennels  knew  long  ago ;  for  in  this  respect,  more 
than  in  any  other,  man  stands  related  to  the 
animal  kingdom.  The  toilers  of  the  laboratory 
now  believe  that  every  child  has  his  cast  of  mind 
and  maximum  capacity  determined  at  birth.  En¬ 
vironment  and  education  may  expand  his  mental 
and  physical  powers  up  to  that  capacity — but  not 
an  inch  further.  The  making  of  every  genius  has 
gone  on  centuries  before  his  birth,  in  the  succes¬ 
sive  matings  of  capable  individuals.  True,  not 
every  individual  in  an  able  strain  has  genius  nor 
yet  extraordinary  talent.  The  Mendelian  law  of 
heredity,  which  causes  the  traits  of  an  individual 
to  skip  so  oddly  through  the  generations  of  his 
descendants,  accounts  for  that.  But  on  averages, 
the  clever  reproduce  the  clever,  the  powerful  the 
powerful,  the  inept  the  inept.  We  have  been  able 


144 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


to  trace  the  line  of  a  man  disguised  under  the 
name  of  Juke,  who  lived  a  sodden,  worthless, 
drunken  life  in  the  seventeenth  century.  He 
married  a  woman  of  his  own  sort,  fathered  many 
children.  And  the  line  of  Jukes,  thenceforth,  is 
hung  like  a  gallows  tree  with  thieves  and  drunk¬ 
ards,  shoplifters  and  prostitutes,  morons  and 
idiots.  Jonathan  Edwards,  intelligent,  forceful 
member  of  the  Old  New  England  theocracy, 
married  a  good,  sound,  able  woman.  Their  line 
has  blossomed  ever  since  into  ability — literary, 
political,  clerical,  scholarly.  William  Cecil,  Lord 
Burghley  was  the  minister  of  state  responsible 
for  much  of  Queen  Elizabeth’s  success  and  glory. 
He  married  “the  most  learned  lady  of  her  time.” 
He  had  relatives  almost  as  able,  who  married  into 
families  marked  by  ability.  In  every  generation 
since,  the  blood  of  Cecil  has  produced  men  with 
the  genius  of  government.  Arthur  Balfour  and 
Lord  Robert  Cecil  are  the  examples  in  this  age. 
All  breeders  of  fine  dogs,  horses  or  cattle  work 
on  this  principle,  mating  select  individual  with 
select  individual  to  produce  the  perfect  strain.  We 
cannot  proceed  in  this  cold-blooded  manner  with 
humanity ;  but  we  can  do  much  by  seeing,  through 
moral  influence,  that  the  strong,  able  and  intelli¬ 
gent  have  children  and  carry  on,  while  discourag¬ 
ing,  so  far  as  compatible  with  morals  and  liberty, 


THE  HUMAN  LOSS 


145 


the  mating  of  the  sickly,  the  defective,  the  crimi¬ 
nal  and  the  under-brained.  Probably,  nature  has 
all  the  time  been  doing  this  for  us ;  probably,  the 
average  man  of  any  European  stock  had  at  the 
beginning  of  the  twentieth  century  much  more 
native  soundness  of  body  and  capacity  of  mind 
than  the  corresponding  man  of  the  first  century. 

Now  comes  modern  war,  to  reverse  this  process. 
Had  we  been  trying  to  breed  the  European  back¬ 
ward  to  a  race  of  scrubs,  we  could  have  devised 
no  more  subtly  successful  process  than  the  war  of 
1914-1918,  with  its  preliminaries.  Forty  or  fifty 
years  before,  the  Continental  nations  introduced 
universal  conscription.  As  soon  as  Great  Britain 
and  the  United  States  really  got  into  the  war, 
they  were  obliged  to  adopt  the  same  plan  or  a 
kindred  one.  However,  the  Continental  nation 
had  longer  dealt  with  this  process;  we  may  best 
study  this  reverse  breeding  by  a  study  of  the 
French,  German,  Austrian  and  Italian  armies. 
The  conception  is  at  bottom  democratic.  Since  the 
state  gives  equal  rights  to  all,  it  demands  equal 
service.  Every  citizen  must  stand  ready  to  fight 
his  country’s  battles.  No  longer  must  the  duty  of 
making  war  be  assigned  to  the  dregs  of  the  popu¬ 
lation,  plus  the  adventurous  members  of  the 
aristocracy.  Having  established  this,  the  Conti¬ 
nental  nations  began  their  era  of  intense  arma- 


146 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


ment,  and  put  principle  into  practice.  They 
“ called  up”  all  the  young  men  of  eighteen  or 
nineteen  or  twenty,  examined  them  physically  and 
mentally,  rejected  the  hunchbacked,  the  tuber¬ 
culous,  the  dwarfed,  the  exceptionally  stupid; 
drilled  and  trained  the  rest  for  their  standing  and 
reserve  armies.  During  the  Great  War,  the  Con¬ 
tinental  nations  called  out  virtually  all  of  the 
able-bodied  men  between  fourteen  and  forty-nine.1 
These  were  the  eugenic  flower,  on  the  male  side, 
of  all  Europe.  The  inferior  specimens  were  left 
at  home,  to  find  employment  in  war  industries,  to 
prosper,  to  marry  and  to  breed.  The  war  killed 
ten  million  soldiers.  It  killed  soonest  and  most 
wantonly  the  “first-line  troops/ ’  young  men  who 
had  not  married  or  who  had  recently  married 
and  as  yet  produced  no  children.  They  were,  to 
the  race,  a  total  loss.  While  statistics  on  this 
point  are  not  yet  available,  probably  seventy-five 
per  cent  of  the  unmarried  Frenchmen  who  entered 
the  war  as  first-line  troops  never  came  out.  The 
older  men,  who  had  already  fathered  children, 
guarded  the  rear,  where  the  losses  were  lightest. 
Everything  was  so  arranged,  under  the  demo- 


1  The  conscripts  were  generally  called  to  the  colors  at  the  age 
of  eighteen.  The  ‘  ‘  class  of  1918  ’  ’  was  only  fourteen  years  old 
in  1914.  The  limit  of  conscription  was  usually  forty-five;  men  of 
that  age,  mobilized  in  1914,  were  forty-nine  years  old  when  the 
war  closed. 


THE  HUMAN  LOSS 


147 


cratic  system  of  conscription,  as  to  inflict  the 
maximum  damage  on  the  breed. 

This  of  course  applied  only  to  the  male  half  of 
the  species.  Though  women  died  in  thousands  by 
shells  and  bombs,  in  millions  by  malnutrition, 
starvation  and  massacre,  the  victims  were  not 
selected  eugenically.  However,  certain  acute  mili¬ 
tarist  politicians,  studying  the  lessons  of  the  Great 
War,  concluded  that  the  nations  had  overlooked 
one  mighty  aid  to  history.  Blindly  and  foolishly, 
they  had  mobilized  only  soldiers.  To  make  a 
nation  one  hundred  per  cent  effective,  it  must 
mobilize  everything  it  has — capital,  industrial 
plants,  and  especially  human  material.  Munitions, 
in  another  war,  must  not  be  manufactured  by 
private  enterprise.  The  state  must  seize  what 
machinery  of  production  it  needs,  and  put  it  to 
work  under  direction  of  the  general  staff.  Pur¬ 
suant  to  this  plan,  Secretary  of  War  Weeks,  early 
in  1923,  imparted  a  plan  for  incorporating  our 
factories  into  the  war  machine.  He  did  not  ven¬ 
ture  so  far — at  the  time — as  to  touch  on  human 
material.  That,  doubtless,  will  come  later,  when 
the  country  has  accustomed  itself  to  the  idea. 
Abroad,  they  have  been  more  frank.  There, 
labor  for  war  work  is  to  be  mobilized — rounded 
up,  looked  over,  examined  physically  and  men¬ 
tally,  to  select  the  best,  reject  the  inferior  and  de- 


148 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


fective.  Even  more  than  in  the  late  war,  women 
will  do  the  work  of  making  munitions.  War  fac¬ 
tories  were  a  constant  object  of  attack  from  the 
air  in  the  World  War.  But  aerial  attack  was  then 
highly  unsatisfactory;  only  after  the  Armistice 
did  the  aerial  torpedo  and  the  wireless-controlled 
aeroplane  make  it  as  accurate  as  gunfire  and  far 
more  deadly.  Also,  there  is  the  new  explosive, 
whatever  it  may  be.  The  women  who  fill  car¬ 
tridges,  gauge  shells,  finish  the  parts  of  cannon, 
will  be  in  the  front  line  as  much  as  the  armed 
men.  They  will  die  perhaps  by  millions ;  and  they 
will  be  the  best  young  breeding  stock  on  the 
female  side,  as  the  soldiers  on  the  male. 

However,  it  remained  for  us  Americans  to  put 
the  finishing  touch  on  to  the  plans  for  emascula¬ 
tion  of  our  male  stock.  As  every  one  knows,  not 
only  did  we  weed  out  our  young  regiments  by 
physical  selection,  but  we  also  gave  them  mental 
tests.  Ignoring  the  fortuitous  factor  of  educa¬ 
tion,  we  looked,  so  far  as  psychology  is  now  able, 
into  their  basic  intelligence.  On  the  results  of 
these  tests,  we  marked  them  A,  B,  C,  D  and  E, 
meaning  very  superior,  superior,  average,  below 
average  and  low.  From  Class  A  we  made  officers. 
Now  statistics  of  casualties  in  the  European  armies 
show  that  in  spite  of  every  precaution  more  officers 
of  combat  divisions  are  killed  than  privates.  Out 


THE  HUMAN  LOSS 


149 


of  class  D,  we  made  ditch  diggers,  laborers  on 
the  docks  at  the  rear,  road  builders.  Troops  of 
this  class  come  only  occasionally  under  fire,  and 
suffer  but  few  casualties.  As  for  the  class  E  men 
— we  used  them  for  the  same  service,  or  sent  them 
back  to  civilian  life.  We  did  not,  however,  pro¬ 
hibit  their  marrying.  Even  more  cleverly  than 
the  Europeans,  we  arranged  it  so  that  war  should 
do  the  uttermost  damage  to  the  breed.  Of  course, 
we  escaped  any  such  devastation  of  the  stock  as 
Europe  knows ;  for  the  war  ended  before  we  had 
even  begun  to  put  forth  our  maximum  effort.  But 
if  men  of  the  European  races  go  on  with  war, 
which  more  and  more  demands  the  best  of  every¬ 
thing  from  the  nation  that  undertakes  it,  this 
special  American  invention  will  be  adopted  every¬ 
where. 

How  much  the  World  War  did  to  set  back  the 
European  stock  we  shall  not  know  for  a  genera¬ 
tion.  How  much  it  weakened  the  breed  in  com¬ 
parison  with  other  wars  we  shall  never  know ;  we 
have  no  vital  statistics  of  former  ages.  However, 
one  thing  seems  certain  about  the  future.  If  we 
indulge  in  another  general  war  and  still  another, 
our  civilization  may  be  so  tough  a  structure  that 
we  shall  stagger  through  somehow.  Disorganized, 
poverty-stricken,  starving  by  millions,  we  may  yet 
carry  on.  But  the  breed  which  made  that  civiliza- 


150 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


tion  will  grow  inept,  anemic,  neurotic ;  tlie  power 
and  glory  will  go  out  of  the  Caucasian.  And 
leadership  in  the  world  will  pass  to  the  yellow 
or  the  brown.  That  is  the  real  yellow  peril — that 
the  white  race,  through  its  truculence  and  folly, 
will  destroy  its  ability  and  accommodatingly  step 
aside.2 

Since  it  will  go  on  to  the  end  of  our  racial  his¬ 
tory,  that  blow  to  the  race  constitutes  the  great 
human  loss  of  the  World  War.  However,  there 
was  a  lesser  immediate  loss  which,  in  this  first 
decade  after  the  Armistice,  Europe  feels  already 
and  will  feel  with  increasing  keenness  so  long  as 
our  generation  shall  live.  Of  the  ten  million 
soldiers  killed  in  battle,  probably  three  quarters 
were  less  than  thirty  years  old.  How  much  of 
European  talent  and  genius  died  thus,  before  its 
work  began,  we  shall  never  know.  I  stood  in  the 
streets  of  Louvain  in  August,  1914,  watching  the 
advance  guard,  the  shock  troops,  of  the  German 
army.  There  clumped  past  a  company  which 
glinted  back  the  sun  from  a  hundred  pairs  of 
spectacles.  Who  these  men  were  and  whence  they 

2  This  so-called  ‘ 1  eugenic  argument ’ ’ 1  have  discussed  at  greater 
length  in  “The  Next  War.”  If  I  repeat  my  thought  here,  it  is 
because  I  consider  this  fruit  of  war  so  important,  and  yet  so  little 
understood  that  it  must  be  hammered  at  every  opportunity  into 
the  heads  of  our  democracy.  To  those  who  are  interested,  I  recom¬ 
mend  Dr.  David  Starr  Jordan’s  “War  and  the  Breed,”  and  Dr. 
Vernon  Kellogg’s  studies  of  French  army  statistics  after  the 
Napoleonic  wars. 


THE  HUMAN  LOSS 


151 


came,  I  never  knew;  but  they  bore  the  stamp  of 
scholarship.  Now  I  had  been  living,  before  I  went 
to  the  war,  near  a  case  of  cancer ;  and  I  had  been 
thinking  much  on  that  unsolved  mystery  of  cell 
growth  and  cell  anarchy.  Also  I  knew  the  accom¬ 
plishments  of  German  scholarship  in  medical  re¬ 
search.  The  thought  flashed  into  my  mind : 
‘ 4  Perhaps  under  one  of  those  ridiculous  little 
round  caps  there  marches  the  secret  of  cancer!” 
If  so,  it  must  have  died  in  the  seed;  that  division 
was  all  but  annihilated  at  Le  Cateau  and  the 
Marne. 

Here  they  were,  these  fresh  selected  young  men 
of  all  Europe,  going  out  to  die  in  millions.  They 
had  been  reared  in  an  age  whose  zeal  for  educa¬ 
tion  had  made  it  easy  for  the  man  of  exceptional 
talent  to  get  training  and  a  hearing.  In  their 
ranks  marched  the  scientific  discoverers,  the  in¬ 
ventors,  the  poets,  the  novelists,  the  painters,  the 
composers,  the  philosophers  of  the  next  genera¬ 
tion.  But  these  heralds  of  the  dawn  went  down 
to  festering  death  along  with  the  clowns  and  dolts. 
Who  knows  just  what  we  lost — what  obscure 
names  which  might  have  been  immortal  figured 
under  that  fatal,  taciturn  caption,  “Killed  in 
Action”?  And  perhaps  one  among  them — but  I 
have  had  my  dreams  of  him!  He  has  long 
haunted  my  imagination — my  Unknown. 


152 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


At  times,  I  indulge  the  fancy  that  I  have  seen 
him  in  the  flesh.  Down  the  white  road  to  battle 
would  plod  a  German  battalion  droning  in  four 
parts  a  militant  song;  a  British  battalion  drop¬ 
ping  from  scrubbed,  stolid,  red  faces  a  trickle  of 
light  banter;  a  French  battalion  casting  quick, 
alert  glances  to  right  and  left ;  an  Italian  battalion 
absorbed  in  the  dramatic  importance  of  the  busi¬ 
ness  at  hand;  an  American  battalion  expressing 
in  a  free,  careless  swing  their  pioneer  feeling  that 
here  was  a  big  job  to  be  done  and  they  were  going 
to  do  it,  no  matter  how  disagreeable.  From  the 
tumble  of  bobbing  heads,  a  face  would  turn  sud¬ 
denly,  look  for  an  instant  upon  me  .  .  .  fade  back 
into  the  mass  as  the  steady  beat  of  the  column 
carried  on  past.  Thrilled  with  a  sense  of  its 
potential  young  power,  chilled  with  a  vision  of 
what  it  might  be  like  before  the  night  of  battle 
fell,  always  I  remembered  that  face  for  days. 
Especially  the  eyes.  Whether  they  were  black  of 
the  South,  blue  of  the  North,  hazel  of  the  Midi, 
they  glinted  with  a  cosmic  activity  and  yet  held 
level  with  an  infinite,  pregnant  stillness.  The 
look  with  which  they  regarded  me,  the  stranger, 
was  akin  to  curiosity  only  as  love  is  akin  to  lust, 
faith  to  credulity.  It  was  not  my  appearance,  my 
clothes,  the  reasons  for  my  presence  there  by  the 
roadside  which  raised  wonder  in  him;  he  was 


THE  HUMAN  LOSS 


153 


searching  rather  for  my  place  and  his  in  this 
tangled  scheme.  Those  still  eyes,  of  whose  power 
he  was  not  yet  aware,  looked  through  the  surface 
of  things  to  the  soul  beneath.  .  .  .  The  column 
would  fade  into  the  mists  near  that  disturbed, 
dusty  sky,  that  intermittent  rattle  of  a  million  ex¬ 
plosions,  which  is  the  horizon  of  battle. 

Yet  whether  I  have  seen  him  or  no,  I  try  some¬ 
times  to  reconstruct  the  life  of  my  Unknown,  to 
describe  for  myself  not  only  what  kind  of  mature 
man  he  might  have  been,  but  what  kind  of  child, 
boy  and  youth  he  really  was.  I  think  that  he  came 
of  the  sturdy  European  yeoman  stock  which  has 
for  ten  centuries  blossomed  into  that  rarest  flower 
of  genius,  the  man  who  remakes  worlds.  From 
such  antecedents  sprang  Italy’s  Garibaldi, 
France’s  Pasteur,  our  Lincoln,  the  world’s 
Shakespeare.  The  same  stock,  two  or  three  gen¬ 
erations  removed  from  the  soil,  produced  Goethe, 
Darwin,  Erasmus.  As  a  child,  he  played  before 
some  miner’s  cottage  in  Silesia  or  Wales, 
Pennsylvania  or  Flanders ;  some  farmhouse  in  the 
blue  Vosges,  the  green  Pentlands  or  the  tawny 
Appennines;  some  wayside  inn  by  a  broad  high¬ 
way  across  the  American  plains,  the  English 
valleys,  the  Kussian  steppes.  The  rest  of  his  life 
I  see  a  little  more  definitely  and  certainly.  His 
schoolmasters,  very  probably,  felt  a  trifle  irritated 


154 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


with  him  because  he  could  learn  and  often  would 
not.  At  least  he  would  not  learn,  up  to  his  ca¬ 
pacity,  unless  the  subject  touched  his  whimsical 
interest.  However,  at  some  time  in  this  serene 
youth  of  his  a  teacher  wiser  than  the  rest  observed 
him  reading  a  book  above  the  understanding  gen¬ 
eral  to  his  years,  or  working  with  amazing  intent¬ 
ness  at  a  self-appointed  task,  and  said  to  himself : 
“Perhaps  this  is  an  unusual  boy  after  all.  .  . 

Because  his  parents  had  struggled  up  to  an 
existence  with  a  margin  above  bare  necessity,  be¬ 
cause  the  sturdy  people  of  the  soil  value  learning 
even  above  its  deserts,  he  went  on  to  Gymnase  or 
Lycee  or  High  School.  I  am  not  sure  that  he  stood 
always  at  the  head  of  his  class,  or  won  all  the 
prizes.  It  takes  longer  to  dam  a  great  river  than 
a  brook.  But  here,  more  of  his  elders  must  have 
noted  the  original  attack  of  his  mind  on  new  prob¬ 
lems,  and  wondered  if  he  would  not  go  far.  Per¬ 
haps  during  that  disturbed  period  when  adoles¬ 
cence  is  blundering  into  manhood,  he  was  driven 
by  a  devil  of  nervous  energy  which  vented  itself 
in  strange  pranks.  It  is  much  more  likely  that  he 
was  still  and  moody;  only  with  a  pregnant  still¬ 
ness,  “like  that  of  a  spinning  top.”  Probably, 
his  schoolmates  scarcely  noticed  him  at  all; 
though  had  he  lived  to  fulfillment  and  honored 
age,  they  would  have  written  in  their  reminis- 


THE  HUMAN  LOSS 


155 


cences  of  him,  “We  always  realized  that  he  was 
unusual. ?  y 

The  year  1914 — or  perhaps  1917 — found  him  at 
last  out  of  school,  his  feet  on  the  lower  rungs  of 
some  technical  or  professional  career;  by  now, 
people  in  general  had  begun  to  perceive  an  ex¬ 
ceptional  quality  in  him,  and  to  prophesy  a  career. 
He  had,  probably  a  good,  stalwart  body— twenty 
generations  bred  close  to  the  soil  had  attended 
to  that.  Great  souls  and  minds  sometimes  gleam 
from  frail  settings — as  Alexander  Pope,  Robert 
Louis  Stevenson,  Heinrich  Heine.  However,  they 
are  the  exceptions.  It  takes  mighty  thews  to  carry 
a  mighty  soul.  Washington  and  Lincoln  were  the 
outstanding  athletes  of  their  region  and  time, 
Shakespeare  was  “marvelous  well  formed.”  So, 
when  the  long  peace  broke  into  the  Great  War, 
my  Unknown  marched  away  with  the  rest.  If  he 
was  a  Frenchman,  a  German  or  an  Italian,  he  had 
no  choice  in  the  matter.  If  he  was  a  Briton  or  an 
American,  I  think  he  volunteered  in  the  first  wave. 
He  would  do  that,  naturally,  having  the  courage 
which  is  so  large  an  element  in  greatness. 

Had  the  sergeant  come  to  Stratford-on-Avon  at 
about  1585,  seeking  recruits  for  the  Queen,  his 
eye  might  have  lit  on  a  well-formed,  likely  look¬ 
ing  lad,  son  of  Alderman  Shakespeare.  But  would 
the  village  think  of  sending  Will  to  the  wars?  Not 


156 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


at  all;  Will  was  a  scholar,  as  Stratford  knew 
scholarship.  If  he  would  only  turn  his  mind  to 
serious  things,  the  vicar  averred,  he  might  grow 
great  in  the  Church;  and  the  schoolmaster  pro¬ 
claimed  abroad  that  he  translated  Ovid  so  well 
— and  in  English  rhymes,  too — that  the  transla¬ 
tion  scarce  yielded  to  the  original.  War  was  for 
gentlefolk  and  for  lads  who  would  not  settle  down 
or  were  good  for  naught  else.  It  was  not  for  such 
as  Will.  What  a  protest  would  have  gone  up  from 
a  cloister  of  Deventer  if  any  one  had  tried  to  put 
a  uniform  on  that  promising  young  scholar, 
Erasmus!  But  the  nations  do  things  more  thor¬ 
oughly  in  these  days;  “the  better  the  man,  the 
better  his  duty.”  My  Unknown  of  1914  marched 
away  with  the  rest,  and  the  village  cheered. 

Then  one,  two  or  three  years  of  misery  and 
hardening  and  alternate  waves  of  exaltation,  dis¬ 
gust,  sickening  weariness,  halting  fear.  I  fancy, 
somehow,  that  my  Unknown  remained  in  the  ranks 
to  the  end.  His  talents  were  not  military ;  he  had 
no  ambition  to  lead  in  that  way.  But  in  the  long 
leisures  of  nights  on  guard  under  the  flare  lights, 
of  loafing  in  the  rest  stations,  that  dynamic,  half- 
controlled  mind  of  his  was  thinking,  thinking. 
And  one  day  some  significant  incident,  some  un¬ 
considered  remark  of  a  comrade,  some  line  flash¬ 
ing  from  a  soiled,  month-old  newspaper,  struck  a 


THE  HUMAN  LOSS 


157 


spark  from  that  subconscious  entity  in  which  lies 
the  secret  of  creation.  Dimly  amidst  the  thoughts 
large  but  vague  which  crowded  all  his  waking 
hours,  he  began  to  form  his  plan.  Thenceforth, 
as  he  stood  in  the  listening  post,  eyes  and  ears 
on  the  alert,  as  he  lay  awake  in  the  filth  and 
stench  of  the  dugout  with  the  shells  bursting  in 
dull  explosions  outside,  as  he  plodded  down  the 
dusty  roads  under  the  dustier  burden  of  his  pack, 
he  got  a  kind  of  happiness  by  building  his  own 
future  and  that,  so  closely  linked,  of  the  world. 
Happiness !  That  joy  of  young  creation  rose  now 
and  then  to  ecstasy.  Sometimes,  but  that  the  eye 
of  his  officer  was  upon  him,  he  could  have  tossed 
his  arms  upward  to  the  Heavens,  defied  the 
stars.  .  .  . 

Thought  and  happiness  ended  one  day  in  a 
single  blinding  flash.  The  power  invincible  fell 
from  the  heavens.  In  due  time,  the  formal  notice 
came  to  his  mother — “died  in  action” — for  the 
Patrie,  his  country,  the  Czar,  the  Fatherland  or 
the  King.  The  seal  was  put  upon  his  destiny.  He 
was  forever  the  Unknown. 

Not,  in  all  human  probability,  one  of  the  Un¬ 
known  who  were  buried  like  kings  by  the  great 
Allied  Nations.  There  are  but  five  of  these;  and 
ten  million  men  died  in  the  Great  War.  So  the 
chances  are  two  million  to  one  against  that.  No, 


158 


CHRIST  OR  MARS  ? 


he  does  not  lie  under  the  abbey  where  roars  the 
loud  industry  of  London,  nor  at  the  head  of  the 
great,  starry  avenue  where  the  arch  crowns  the 
grace  of  Paris,  nor  in  the  Victor  Emmanuel  monu¬ 
ment  where  the  eyes  of  the  dead  may  behold  the 
grandeur  that  was  Eome,  nor  where  the  serrated 
spires  rise  above  comely  Brussels,  nor  yet  over 
the  calm  Potomac,  where  wide  lawns  and  Indian 
woods  break  into  a  vista  of  stately  Washington. 
No  crowds  have  wept  and  cheered  about  his  tomb, 
no  Field  Marshals  have  laid  upon  it  the  decora¬ 
tions  of  valor.  As  I  may  have  seen  him  in  the 
flesh,  so  I  may  have  seen  his  grave.  Perhaps  it  is 
only  a  sunken  trench  in  the  old  battlefields — one 
of  those  trenches  where  they  died  too  fast  for 
decent  burial,  where  the  unaccustomed  visitor 
used  to  turn  his  eyes  away  from  the  obscene  bits 
of  festering  human  flesh.  His  may  have  been 
among  those  bleached  rib  bones  which,  six  months 
after  the  guns  were  stilled,  strewed  Vimy  Ridge 
or  the  blasted  fields  about  Verdun.  More  likely, 
his  grave  lies  obscurely  among  those  prairies  of 
uniform  crosses  about  Douamont  or  Ypres  or 
Rheims,  or  in  one  of  those  little,  fenced  cemeteries 
which  fringe  the  Carso  and  the  Polish  border.  If 
so,  the  cross  bears  his  regiment,  the  day  when  he 
fell,  his  name.  But  he  is  nevertheless  eternally 
unknown. 


THE  HUMAN  LOSS 


159 


Except  perhaps  to  one.  I  think  that  his  mother, 
when  the  war  was  over,  came  from  far  to  visit 
all  that  remains  to  memorialize  him.  And  prob¬ 
ably  the  divine  intuition  granted  to  the  quality  of 
motherhood  had  made  her  see  long  before.  She 
always  knew;  as  did  Mary  Arden  when  her  Will 
spoke  sometimes  from  his  long  meditation  under 
the  rosebushes  of  her  Stratford  garden,  or  as 
Nancy  Hanks  knew  when  her  Abraham,  reading 
beside  a  pine-knot  blaze,  looked  up  at  her  some¬ 
times  with  those  strange,  angelic  eyes.  She 
knows ;  but  she  alone. 

Who  was  he  ?  I  cannot  tell ;  but  I  can  tell  what 
he  was.  He  was  that  benevolent  master  of  human 
destinies  created  once  in  an  age  to  lead  his  world 
a  stage  higher.  He  was  a  Moses  not  for  one  tribe 
but  for  all  the  tribes  of  men ;  he  was  William  the 
Silent;  he  was  Lincoln.  The  age  into  which  he 
was  born  had  its  own  special  need  of  him ;  as  the 
raw  materials  of  his  divine  craft  are  always  ready 
for  the  hand  of  genius.  Here  was  a  world  sud* 
denly  hectic  with  prosperity,  sick  with  undigested 
or  ill-distributed  wealth,  and  mad  with  national¬ 
ism;  a  world  preparing  for  the  greatest  of  all 
wars  and  yet,  unknown  to  the  generality,  in  a 
stage  of  humanity  when  war  had  no  longer  any 
apology  for  existence.  He  was  the  one  man  in  a 


160 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


century  born  with  the  insight  to  behold  things  as 
they  are  and  the  force  to  solidify  his  misty 
imaginings  into  accomplishment.  He  it  was  whose 
vision  would  have  found  the  formula  by  which 
men  of  different  tribes,  tongues  and  creeds  may 
get  along  together  in  this  world,  and  whose  force 
of  character  would  have  infused  that  formula  with 
life.  Had  war  granted  him  forty  more  years,  we 
should  have  sepulchred  him  above  kings. 

For  want  of  him,  old  men,  set  in  the  intellec¬ 
tual  fashions  of  a  past,  unnatural  age,  try  to 
govern  and  control  a  new  world  on  political  be¬ 
liefs  as  dead  as  witchcraft.  For  want  of  him,  the 
young  waste  in  sickly  “art  movements”  or  point¬ 
less,  purposeless,  headless  rebellions,  that  energy 
which  might  transform  civilization.  For  want  of 
him,  Europe  drifts  toward  the  shoals  of  inaction 
or  the  rapids  of  destruction.  The  war,  which  took 
three  hundred  billions  of  treasure  and  ten  million 
lesser  lives,  took  also  him.  And  he,  the  master 
genius  Unknown  who  died  before  his  work  had 
begun — he  is  perhaps  the  supreme  tragedy  of  it 
all. 


CHAPTER  X 


JUSTICE  BETWEEN  NATIONS 

All  this  is  what  the  Voice  says  to  me.  I  trans¬ 
late  it  poorly.  I  have  only  words,  and  He  who 
Speaks  conveys  His  thought  with  vibrations  of  the 
infinite  beyond  my  dull  perceptions.  But  my  im¬ 
perfect  rendition  proceeds  not  from  any  lack  of 
conviction.  Through  four  years  at  front  and  rear, 
among  marching  regiments  and  rioting  crowds, 
in  squalid  trenches  and  splendid  chancelleries,  I 
saw  the  face  of  war.  I  know  that  it  is  useless, 
foolish,  serving  no  good  end  of  the  spirit ;  I  know 
that  it  hampers  all  righteous  causes ;  and  I  know 
that  if  man  ever  reacts  to  peace  with  even  a  shade 
of  the  enthusiasm  evoked  in  him  by  war,  he  can 
prevent  it  forever. 

That  is  the  point — it  can  be  prevented.  Were 
it  a  mysterious  calamity  beyond  human  control, 
like  an  earthquake,  there  would  be  no  more  to 
say.  Once,  we  did  consider  it  inevitable — just  as 
we  considered  the  periodic  outbreaks  of  Plague. 
But  recently  we  have  found  in  a  tiny  flea  which 
infects  rats  the  cause  of  that  disease.  And  now, 


161 


162 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


m  all  civilized  lands,  the  Plague  is  finished.  Even 
before  1914,  men  of  good-will  who  passed  often  as 
irresponsible  cranks  were  studying  the  causes  of 
war,  and  the  means  of  prevention.  The  calamity 
itself  immeasurably  quickened  that  study.  No 
longer  did  despised  pioneers  alone  undertake  it, 
but  esteemed  and  powerful  statesmen  like 
Bourgeois  in  France,  Branting  in  Sweden,  Cecil 
in  England,  Root  and  Wilson  in  the  United 
States.  Millions  in  every  nation — a  minority  but 
still  a  most  intelligent  one — burned  with  the  con¬ 
viction  that  war  had  become  outworn,  that  society 
must  eliminate  the  duello  from  its  international 
processes,  as  it  had  long  ago  eliminated  trial  by 
battle  from  its  legal  processes.  No  such  outburst 
against  this  venerable  institution  had  ever  before 
followed  one  of  the  great  “periodic  upheavals.’ ’ 
It  seemed  possible  that  this  disease  of  society, 
like  certain  diseases  of  individuals,  generated  at 
its  most  acute  stage  its  own  antitoxin. 

These  students  of  the  great  international 
disease  found  the  root  of  war  of  the  same  struc¬ 
ture  as  that  of  most  crime — just  unchecked  human 
greed.  The  scientific  militarists  of  the  nineteenth 
century  had  a  sound  thought  in  their  phrase,  “in¬ 
escapable  economic  conflict.”  Between  nations, 
as  between  individuals,  economic  conflicts  arise 
continually.  The  increasing  intercommunication 


JUSTICE  BETWEEN  NATIONS 


163 


of  the  world  renders  them  ever  more  common. 
But  those  conflicts,  as  between  individuals,  now 
seldom  lead  to  duels.  We  outlawed  long  ago  the 
process  of  shooting,  bludgeoning  or  stabbing  to 
determine  which  owned  the  ox,  which  had  the  right 
to  the  spring,  where  the  line  fence  ran.  Now  how 
did  we  accomplish  all  that?  Well,  in  the  first 
place  the  tribe,  duchy  or  nation  agreed  to  the 
proposition  that  this  kind  of  thing  would  not  do. 
Then  haltingly,  irregularly,  mixing  wisdom  with 
all  kinds  of  superstition  and  folly,  rulers  or 
peoples  or  both  drew  up  the  rules  of  the  game, 
established  penalties  for  their  violation.  This  in 
itself  did  not  stop  the  trouble,  of  course ;  men  still 
had  their  economic  conflicts.  So  the  tribes,  duchies 
or  nations  invented  ‘  ‘  justice. ?  ’  They  set  up  courts 
where  men  skilled  in  the  rules  of  the  game  and 
elected  by  the  majority  or  appointed  by  the  ruling 
power,  settled  these  conflicts  without  riot,  blood¬ 
shed  or  disturbance.  He  who  now  denies  the 
validity  of  this  process  we  call  an  anarchist  or  a 
criminal;  and  in  one  view  a  criminal  is  only  a 
throwback  to  the  psychology  of  some  savage  who 
lived  before  the  law.  Society  has  never  found 
any  other  means  to  enforce  economic  order;  to 
check  and  eliminate  the  crimes  of  greed. 

How  has  it  been  with  nations?  Let  us  invent 
an  example.  In  the  nineteenth  century,  Ruritania 


164 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


was  drawing  raw  materials  for  a  certain  valuable 
product  from  a  district  down  in  Africa.  Ruritania 
bad  been  first  to  see  and  exploit  this  promising 
region,  advancing  money  to  its  chiefs,  monopoliz¬ 
ing  its  concessions,  finally  throwing  about  it  a 
‘ 4 protectorate’ 9  which  somewhat  resembled  the 
protectorate  of  a  thief  over  his  stolen  goods. 
Under  the  ordinary  human  code  of  right  and 
wrong,  this  sort  of  thing  would  figure  as  illegal, 
unfair,  criminal.  And  so  the  chiefs,  headmen  and 
populace  of  the  little  district  down  in  Africa  con¬ 
sidered  it.  But  what  could  they  do?  Their 
weapons  were  flintlock  guns  and  out-dated  horse 
pistols,  while  the  Ruritanians  fought  with  repeat¬ 
ing  rifles,  machine  guns,  cannon.  Had  the  African 
tribe  and  Ruritania  been  individuals,  the  Africans 
when  this  process  began,  would  have  gone  to  court 
with  their  grievance ;  and  the  judge  or  jury  which 
denied  them  justice  would  have  branded  itself  as 
corrupt — an  exception  in  modern  society.  But 
nations  had  no  court.  The  Africans  must  endure 
exploitation  as  best  they  might. 

Presently  Ruritania ’s  neighbor,  Lusitania, 
starts  to  manufacture  that  same  product.  She 
wants  some  of  that  indispensable  raw  material. 
She  sends  agents  among  the  natives,  begins  to 
arm  them;  buys  concessions  on  her  own  account. 
Ruritania  was  there  first.  She  makes  a  great  deal 


JUSTICE  BETWEEN  NATIONS 


165 


of  noise  about  her  rights.  So  does  Lusitania.  As 
between  them,  which  is  right  and  which  wrong? 
Probably  they  are  both  wrong.  But  there  is  none 
to  say.  We  have  an  alleged  art  or  science  called 
international  law.  Better  might  it  be  called  inter¬ 
national  etiquette.  On  the  point  at  issue,  as  on 
most  controversies  which  really  affect  human  life, 
international  law  is  silent  or  hazy.  But  even  were 
this  point  covered — who  shall  judge?  The  Hague 
Tribunal?  The  Ruritanians  and  Lusitanians 
laugh  at  that.  A  somewhat  amorphic  body,  its 
decisions  finally  come  down  always  to  the  judg¬ 
ment  of  one  man.  He,  of  course,  is  a  citizen  of 
some  nation.  Not  a  nation  on  earth,  now,  but 
holds  commercial  or  diplomatic  relations  with  one 
disputant  or  the  other,  and  regards  it  with  undue 
fear  or  undue  esteem.  Besides — what  is  the  Hague 
Tribunal  anyway?  The  conference  which  created 
it  was  born  of  a  mystical  mood  in  that  crowned 
fool,  the  Czar  of  Russia.  No  one  in  diplomatic 
life  took  it  seriously.  The  Tribunal  of  Arbitra¬ 
tion  served  to  still  the  increasing  public  clamor 
against  militarism,  and  harmed  no  one.  But  as 
for  referring  to  it  a  question  of  national  honor ! 

For  by  now,  honor  is  evoked.  Lusitania  cannot 
honorably  withdraw.  Ruritania  has  been  insulted 
in  her  sovereignty.  Once,  I  looked  into  forty  or 
more  murders  among  New  York  bootleggers.  Of 


166 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


course,  the  law  does  not  protect  illicit  stores  of 
alcoholic  liquors.  The  bootlegger  must  defend  his 
property  with  his  own  good  right  arm,  his  own 
intensive  armament.  Now  I  found,  as  I  suspected 
I  would,  that  the  original  cause  of  each  murder 
was  a  row  over  division  of  the  spoils;  but  the 
occasion  which  see  the  automatics  go  pumping 
along  Mott  Street  or  Baxter  Street  was  usually  a 
point  of  personal  honor.  The  sensational  press 
magnifies  small  incidents  into  major  offenses.  The 
fleets  and  armies  get  ready  to  mobilize.  Finally, 
one  of  two  things  happens.  The  diplomats  of  the 
two  hostile  powers  may  get  together  and  after 
much  jockeying,  falsifying  and  lying,  arrange 
that  one  or  the  other  shall  withdraw  and  forget 
honor — for  a  consideration.  The  price  is  prob¬ 
ably  a  license  to  do  something  else  which  private 
business  would  consider  crooked  and  ruthless,  like 
creating  a  new  “ sphere  of  influence’ *  over  people 
who  do  not  want  to  be  influenced.  Otherwise — 
they  begin  shooting  and  keep  on  shooting  until 
the  national  honor  of  one  side  has  been  satisfied 
and  the  other  side  is  merely  the  loser.  In  human 
terms  of  plain  people :  from  fraud,  chicanery  and 
trespass,  Ruritania  and  Lusitania  have  proceeded 
unchecked  to  highway  robbery  and  murder. 
Understand,  I  am  not  giving  under  disguised 
names  any  actual  occurrence.  I  am  merely  in- 


JUSTICE  BETWEEN  NATIONS 


167 


venting  an  instance  winch  is  typical  of  the  way 
things  went  between  nations  in  the  Nineteenth 
Century  and  which  strips  the  brass  buttons,  gold 
lace  and  decorations  off  from  modern  war. 

Now  were  there  coded  and  recognized  law  be¬ 
tween  nations,  were  there  international  courts  de¬ 
livering  even-handed  justice,  finally  were  nations 
accustomed,  like  individuals,  to  settle  their  differ¬ 
ences  by  litigation  in  these  courts,  the  great  Buri- 
tanian-Lusitanian  war,  which  left  both  nations 
poorer  and  ruined  even  the  African  province, 
would  have  been  settled  in  a  fortnight  and  settled 
with  at  least  an  approximation  of  justice  to  all. 
Indeed,  it  would  have  been  settled  many  years 
before  the  crisis,  when  it  was  still  a  mere  police 
court  case. 

Men  of  good-will,  of  common  sense,  even  of 
genius,  have  been  studying  the  question  ever  since 
the  Armistice,  and  none  has  found  a  better  way. 
One  by  one,  the  old,  half-hearted  measures  have 
been  dismissed  as  illusory  or  impracticable.  Isola¬ 
tion?  That  is  swimming  against  the  current  of 
history.  The  trend  of  the  past  three  hundred 
years  has  flowed  from  isolation  toward  intercom¬ 
munication.  But  even  if  you  are  self-sufficient 
like  the  United  States,  and  throw  about  yourself 
a  Chinese  wall,  you  do  nothing  to  prevent  attack 
from  without.  Sooner  or  later,  your  treasure 


168 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


houses  will  attract  the  thieves.  It  is  moreover, 
an  essentially  un-Christian  process,  implying  that 
your  own  people  are  the  only  ones  who  merit  sal¬ 
vation,  that  the  rest  of  humanity  may  burn  in  Hell 
for  all  you  care. 

Perfect  defensive  preparation?  Never  in  his¬ 
tory  has  that,  in  the  long  run,  averted  war. 

'  Rather  has  it  invited  war.  It  merely  starts  up 
intensive  preparation  for  defense  in  some  rival 
nation  or  nations.  There  follows  such  a  situation 
as  prevailed  in  Europe  during  the  early  twentieth 
century;  peoples  armed  to  the  teeth,  waiting  in 
fear  and  trembling  to  defend  themselves  when  the 
other  side  strikes.  Preparedness  has  been  de¬ 
scribed  as  ‘ 4 insurance.”  It  is  insurance  indeed, 
but  not  against  war ;  just  against  defeat  in  war. 

The  only  method  that  ever  succeeded  has  con¬ 
sisted  in  friendly  discussion,  while  the  cause  of 
conflict  was  still  young.  By  that  method,  we  have 
kept  reasonable  peace  in  the  Americas.  The  Con¬ 
ference  on  Limitation  of  Armament  in  1921 
averted  or  at  least  delayed  a  useless  and  expensive 
war  on  the  Pacific.  The  present  League  of 
Nations,  imperfect  though  it  be  through  absence^ 
of  Germany,  Russia  and,  especially,  the  powerful 
United  States,  has  yet  nipped  in  the  bud  several 
quarrels  which  might  have  grown  into  wars  a 
decade  or  so  hence.  The  problem  is  to  make  this 


JUSTICE  BETWEEN  NATIONS 


169 


method  of  settling  disputes  customary  and,  in  the 
end,  universally  compulsory;  and  to  create  be¬ 
hind  it  a  real  international  law  so  that  any  nation 
may  know,  as  any  individual  may  know,  when 
according  to  the  mature  judgment  of  mankind  a 
given  act  constitutes  a  crime  or  misdemeanor. 
Several  proposals  to  this  end  clamor  for  the 
recognition  of  American  voters.  Any  one  of  them 
is  better  than  nothing.  Perhaps  it  matters  little 
how  we  start,  so  long  as  we  do  start.  Any  new 
experiment  in  government  emerges  from  its 
embryo  a  thing  transformed.  This  feature  which 
looked  so  promising,  proves  on  trial  impractic¬ 
able;  that  which  seemed  so  unimportant,  turns 
out  to  be  the  keystone  of  the  whole  structure. 
The  greatest  danger  lies  in  hesitation  and  inac¬ 
tion.  For  time  works  with  the  militarists.  While 
we  hesitate,  fearing  to  venture,  tiny  quarrels  and 
irritations  are  growing  toward  little  wars,  greater 
wars,  finally  the  great  general  war  in  which  the 
destructive  inventions  of  man  may  end  our  civil¬ 
ization. 


CHAPTER  XI 


THE  THING  THAT  IS  GOD'S 

However,  mankind  will  never  abolish  war  until 
it  ceases  to  want  war.  Along  with  any  organiza¬ 
tion  of  nations  to  keep  the  peace  must  go  a  pro¬ 
gressive  education  of  public  opinion.  Of  course, 
nineteen  out  of  twenty  people  do  want  permanent 
peace,  or  think  they  do.  But  do  they  want  hard 
enough!  Are  they  willing  to  forego  the  not  un¬ 
pleasant  emotion  of  hate,  to  resist  the  temptations 
of  temporary  national  advantage,  to  shut  their 
hearts  to  certain  old  stirrings  of  the  cave  instinct  ? 
We  have  some  distance  yet  to  go  before  the  citizens 
of  our  Christian  democracies  make  permanent 
peace  a  main  object  of  their  political  thinking. 

“You  cannot  change  the  nature  of  man/'  say 
the  militarists,  repeating  parrotlike  a  phrase,  as 
the  anti-sutfragists  used  to  repeat:  “Woman’s 
place  is  in  the  home.”  That,  probably,  is  not 
entirely  true.  Green  has  called  attention  to 
the  change  which  came  over  England  in  the 
Elizabethan  period.  Before  that  time,  he  says  in 
effect,  we  find  it  hard  to  understand  either 


170 


THE  THING  THAT  IS  GOD’S 


171 


English  statesmanship  or  the  English  popular 
mind.  We  know  that  they  did  certain  things,  but 
we  cannot  fully  understand  why.  However  from 
Cecil  on,  the  mental  operations  of  any  English 
politician  are  as  clear  to  us  as  those  of  the  con¬ 
temporary  Gladstone  or  Disraeli.  In  this  period, 
he  concludes,  the  psychology  of  Englishmen 
underwent  a  subtle  transformation.  And  Ludwig 
Lewisohn  has  given  the  perfect  answer.  “  Per¬ 
haps  we  cannot  change  the  nature  of  man,”  he 
says, 1 6 but  we  can  change  his  mood.”  In  war,  we 
do  that  very  thing.  Six  months  after  the  first  shot 
sounds,  any  belligerent  people  turns  from  toler¬ 
ance  to  hate,  confidence  to  suspicion,  sanity  to 
madness.  The  problem  consists  in  casting  human 
thought  into  a  new  mould,  and  making  the  work 
permanent. 

Yet  the  task,  as  I  review  this  Christendom  of 
ours,  seems  overwhelmingly  great  and  difficult. 
Beside  it  the  long  struggle  for  government  by  the 
people  was  slight  and  easy.  How  shall  we  go  about 
it?  What  common  instrument  is  large  enough,  fine 
enough,  powerful  enough,  so  to  regroup  the  facul¬ 
ties  of  men?  One  alone  in  all  the  world — Chris¬ 
tianity  and  her  elder  sister,  ’Judaism.  Here  alone 
is  a  power  which,  consciously  or  unconsciously, 
governs  the  moral  thought  of  every  man  and 
woman  in  fifty  nations.  Church  attendance  may 


172 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


be  falling  off;  peoples  may  be  taking  their  re¬ 
ligion  with  less  literal,  outward  show  of  serious¬ 
ness  ;  but  rare  nevertheless  is  that  man  or  woman 
who  did  not  receive  Christian  or  Jewish  religious 
instruction  in  childhood;  and,  therefore,  who  does 
not  see  moral  issues,  all  his  life  long,  through  the 
lenses  of  the  Decalogue.  And  divided  though  the 
Church  be  by  sects,  it  is  not  divided  by  nationali¬ 
ties.  We  call  one  branch,  perhaps,  the  Church  of 
England,  another  the  Church  of  Scotland,  another 
the  Church  of  Rome.  These  are  but  the  names 
of  places  where  grow  the  parent  stems.  Every 
one  of  these  has  established  its  offshoots  in  many 
nations.  Considered  in  their  political  aspect, 
ohurches  are  the  only  organizations  which  had 
achieved  a  sound  and  decent  internationalism. 
And  for  ages  upon  ages,  the  Church  has  been 
gathering  experience  with  the  changing  mood  of 
man.  The  phenomenon  of  conversion  is  little  else. 
What  an  instrument  for  achieving  permanent 
peace!  We  should  work  through  many  and  many 
a  weary  generation  before  creating  another  half 
so  well  adapted  to  the  purpose. 

If  all  the  Christian  sects,  combining  with  one 
another  and  with  Judaism  on  this  single  issue, 
should  start  the  work  of  educating  their  sons  and 
daughters  in  the  illusion  and  immorality  of  war, 
we  should  within  a  year  mark  the  changing  mood 


THE  THING  THAT  IS  GOD’S 


173 


of  man.  Within  twenty  years,  when  the  genera¬ 
tion,  at  present  learning  its  texts  and  catechism  in 
Sunday  school,  reached  the  age  of  fruition,  the 
job  of  bringing  peace  to  our  world  would  be  done. 
The  Church  can  do  it,  even  if  she  confines  herself 
to  her  oldest  policy — just  personal  work  with  the 
individual. 

Let  the  doubter  consider  our  great  American 
example.  Seventy-five  years  ago,  we  were  a  race 
of  easy  and  careless  drunkards.  One  strong  divi¬ 
sion  of  the  Christian  churches  in  America  began 
gradually  to  take  up  the  temperance  question. 
The  nineteenth  century  had  run  half  its  course 
before  any  of  them,  as  bodies,  endorsed  teetotal- 
ism.  It  was  later  even  than  that  when  certain 
denominations  began  to  give  systematic  temper¬ 
ance  instruction  in  the  Sunday  schools.  Still 
later,  the  movement  came  firmly  into  politics ;  the 
idea  of  prohibiting  alcoholic  liquor  by  law  be¬ 
came  a  definite  issue.  In  the  early  years  of  the 
twentieth  century,  it  went  with  a  rush.  State 
after  state  voted  dry.  And  this  was  precisely  the 
era  when  the  children  who  had  received  temper¬ 
ance  instruction  in  the  Sunday  schools  came  to 
the  age  of  political  influence.  With  the  idea  that 
stealing,  murder  and  adultery  are  wrong,  they  had 
absorbed  the  idea  that  alcoholic  drink  is  wrong. 
It  was  part  of  their  moral  equipment. 


174 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


Not  otherwise  must  the  Church  proceed  when, 
if  ever,  she  takes  up  this  new  and  most  vital  moral 
reform.  She  must  begin  it  in  early  childhood, 
when  one  gets  his  basic  moral  ideas.  She  has 
taught  her  young  sons  and  daughters  that  good 
citizenship  is  a  Christian  duty;  she  must  teach 
them  now  that  perfect  citizenship  implies  toler¬ 
ance;  that  suspicion  and  generalized  hatred  are 
part  of  the  old  Adam  in  man ;  that  the  pledge  of 
love  and  service  which  the  Christian  takes  at  his 
baptism  or  confirmation  embraces  all  mankind — 
the  whole  population  of  the  City  of  God.  She 
must  teach  that  war  is  not  really  glorious,  but  a 
calamity ;  that  behind  it  lies  always  a  large  wicked¬ 
ness.  She  must  teach,  finally,  that  to  be  Christ’s 
faithful  soldier  means,  in  this  age,  to  be  a  soldier 
of  peace.  A  few  individual  congregations,  a  very 
few  denominations,  do  all  this  already ;  even  if  no 
more  join  in  the  work,  we  shall  feel  the  effect 
fifteen  or  twenty  years  from  now;  and  those  who 
see  merely  the  outside  of  things  will  wonder  at  a 
sudden  “ pacifist  wave.” 

Plow  work,  that,  but  most  necessary.  Cultivat¬ 
ing  and  harvesting  call  for  more  complex  tools, 
more  advanced  methods.  How  shall  organized 
religion,  having  set  its  face  against  war,  proceed 
in  the  face  of  recurrent  national  crises?  “Let 
the  Church  keep  out  of  politics,”  says  one  con- 


THE  THING  THAT  IS  GOD’S 


175 


servative  school  of  Christian  thought.  Which  is 
all  very  well,  when  politics  concern  themselves 
solely  with  the  things  that  are  Caesar’s.  Theocra¬ 
cies  and  chnrch  parties  never  fitted  well  into  the 
structure  of  human  society,  and  are  wholly  out  of 
place  in  democracies.  But  when  a  political  issue 
involves  a  thing  that  is  God’s,  the  Church  has  sel¬ 
dom  held  aloof.  In  medieval  times,  before  Chris¬ 
tianity  was  divided,  the  Pope  laid  interdicts  on 
sovereigns  and  peoples  guilty  of  gross  treacheries 
and  wickedness.  Wlien  Great  Britain  was  dis¬ 
cussing  abolition  of  slavery  in  her  colonies, 
Established  and  Non-conformist  congregations  by 
thousands  declared  for  abolition  and  backed  it  by 
their  votes.  Taking  a  small  and  rather  mean 
example,  when  various  of  our  states  have  pro¬ 
posed  to  exempt  church  property  from  taxation, 
or  to  revoke  an  exemption  already  existing,  the 
churches  have  thrown  themselves  into  the  fight. 
For  a  larger  and  more  recent  example :  when  the 
prohibition  movement  began  to  gather  headway, 
part  of  our  denominations  gave  it  their  frank  in¬ 
dorsement,  conveyed  to  their  members  that  to  vote 
for  any  man  who  favored  the  saloon  constituted 
a  violation  of  church  discipline.  'And  this  war 
against  war  is  a  moral  question  if  there  ever  was 
one;  it  ceased,  somewhere  in  the  nineteenth  cen¬ 
tury,  to  become  Caesar’s;  it  became  God’s. 


176 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


No  impartial  and  informed  witness  of  inter¬ 
national  affairs  doubts  that  world  organization  to 
replace  trial  by  battle  with  trial  by  jury  and  to 
outlaw  war,  is  the  first  necessary  step.  Yet  the 
American  advocates  of  this  method  halt  and 
hesitate  between  several  conflicting  schemes.  If 
our  churches  as  a  whole  ever  reach  agreement  on 
one  plan,  give  it  their  official  indorsement  and 
their  faithful  service,  the  job  will  be  done.  The 
politicians  of  all  parties  will  fall  over  each  other 
in  their  eagerness  to  get  into  their  platforms. 
Just  so,  when  the  prohibition  agitation  received 
the  official  indorsement  of  many  powerful 
churches,  certain  candidates  of  both  great  parties 
who  themselves  drank  a  quart  of  straight  whisky 
a  day,  took  the  platform  to  denounce  the  liquor 
traffic.  The  German  vote,  the  labor  vote,  the 
farmer  vote,  are  all  insignificant  numerically  be¬ 
side  the  church  vote ;  which  every  politician 
knows. 

No  judicious  man  believes  that  when  we  have 
founded  some  firm,  workable  society  or  associa¬ 
tion  or  league  of  nations  to  administer  real  inter¬ 
national  law,  the  task  is  done.  No  mere  agree¬ 
ment,  no  mere  gesture  of  good-will,  can  in  a  flash 
eliminate  one  of  the  oldest  customs  known  to 
society.  It  will  have  many  devils  to  fight — of 
greed,  of  intrigue,  of  self-interest  masked  as 


THE  THING  THAT  IS  GOD’S 


177 


patriotism,  of  political  superstition.  It  cannot 
work  perfectly  at  first.  No  new  form  of  govern¬ 
ment  ever  did.  The  world  will  have  its  moments 
of  a  disgust  which  passes  for  disillusion.  Those 
are  the  times  that  will  try  the  souls  of  good  men, 
and  precisely  the  times  when  such  an  international 
force  as  organized  Christianity  may  do  its  best 
service.  Hatreds,  unreasoning  hatreds  based 
mostly  on  lies,  will  be  then  as  now  the  best  weapon 
of  those  who  do  not  desire  peace.  The  special 
task  of  the  Church  will  be  to  quell  such  hatreds — 
to  prove  their  folly,  to  expose  their  basis  of  in¬ 
sincerity  and  falsehood. 

I  might  even  wish  that  the  Church  would  spread 
some  benevolent  influence  over  my  own  profes¬ 
sion.  “News  is  sin,”  says  Mr.  Dooley,  “and  sin 
is  news.”  Because  of  psychological  processes  too 
long  to  describe  here,  violence  in  journalism  gets 
from  the  public  in  general  a  quicker  response  than 
sanity.  Now  that  world  issues  have  become  part 
of  our  reading  habit,  journalism  is  under  constant 
temptation  to  gain  circulation  by  hinting  at  plots 
against  our  own  national  sovereignty,  by  raising 
the  primitive  blood  instinct.  Such  journalism  can 
be  suppressed  or  discouraged  only  when  the  lead¬ 
ership  of  the  community  it  serves  refuses  to 
patronize  it.  In  the  past,  merchants  have  often 
withdrawn  their  advertising  patronage  from  a 


178 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


newspaper  which  printed  facts  considered  detri¬ 
mental  to  the  business  interests.  That  is  bad;  it 
strikes  indirectly  at  the  liberty  of  the  press,  and 
amounts  to  an  unwarranted  use  of  wealth.  But 
there  is  no  conceivable  immorality  in  refusing  to 
subscribe  for  a  journal  whose  news  columns  dis¬ 
seminate  harmful  lies.  A  general  church  boy¬ 
cott  on  a  war-mongering  newspaper  here  and 
there  might  serve  as  a  gentle  moral  tonic  to  the 
whole  profession. 

Indeed,  every  journalist  knows  that  news  tastes 
in  the  public  can  be  changed  by  a  little  art  com¬ 
bined  with  persistence.  A  certain  city  editor  of  a 
New  York  newspaper  once  made  an  experiment  to 
prove  this  point.  He  asked  himself  first  what  big 
activity  least  interested  the  average  American, 
and  decided  that  it  was  the  art  of  painting.  We 
are  not— -or  were  not  then — an  artistic  people.  So 
he  chose  that  for  his  experiment.  He  began  to  set 
the  most  interesting  writers  he  could  command  to 
the  task  of  reporting  the  current  exhibitions,  de¬ 
scribing  the  masterpieces  of  the  museums  and  the 
private  collections,  gossiping  about  the  technical 
methods  of  eminent  painters.  Within  two  years, 
he  had  made  his  art  department  a  ‘ c  circulation 
builder.’ ’  Just  so,  if  the  Church  will  work  with 
journalism  and  journalism  with  the  Church,  we 
may  create  a  new  kind  of  foreign  news — under- 


THE  THING  THAT  IS  GOD’S 


179 


standing  in  place  of  suspicision,  reasonable  ad¬ 
miration  in  place  of  contempt,  proportionate  truth 
in  place  of  distortion  or  half  truth. 

The  possible  methods  are  of  an  infinite  variety. 
The  necessary  thing  is  for  the  Church  to  know  con¬ 
version,  to  get  a  new  heart.  Oh,  for  a  leader  now 
— an  Amos,  a  Hildebrand,  an  Augustine,  a 
Wesley !  Perhaps  that  predestined  leader  was  my 
Unknown,  killed  obscurely  in  the  Great  War. 
Perhaps  in  default  of  the  lost  leader,  the  Church 
must  proceed  by  the  best  method  that  remains; 
organization  to  make  small  units  a  mighty  whole. 

If  the  Church  refuses  to  hear  this  call  to  new 
and  higher  service,  one  of  two  things  will  happen. 
Either  our  civilization  will  go  on  to  another  world 
war  and  then  another  and  perish  of  its  own  mad 
efficiency,  or  men  and  women  of  goodwill  the 
world  over  will  painfully  organize,  for  this  job 
of  ending  war,  a  new  world-expression  of  man’s 
moral  force.  And  this,  whatever  it  call  itself, 
whatever  form  it  take,  will  be  Christian  in  spirit, 
harmonizing  with  the  majestic  purposes  of  God. 
But  what  an  indictment  of  our  churches!  The 
historian  of  2200  a.d.,  reviewing  events  in  their 
true  perspective,  may  write  that  unchurched  men 
and  women  did  this  thing  in  the  spirit  of  Christ, 
unhelped — nay,  hampered  and  criticized — by  the 
pledged  and  anointed  servants  of  Christ! 


CHAPTER  XII 


PAS-DE-CALAIS,  1918 

The  war  was  almost  over ;  only  that  morning  a 
British  staff  officer  had  run  out  of  his  quarters 
shouting  like  a  hoy  and  waving  at  me,  with  an 
extravagance  of  gesture  almost  Latin,  a  sheet  of 
manifold  paper.  I  snatched  it  from  his  hands. 
Austria  had  abandoned  the  war  and  asked  for 
terms !  As  we  pushed  obliquely  forward,  picking 
and  choosing  intact  roads  for  our  somewhat 
shaky  and  war-worn  automobile,  I  scattered  the 
news,  watched  French  faces  break  into  ripples  of 
excited  emotion,  English  faces  lighten  with  a  slow 
smile.  There  were  those,  however,  from  whom 
we  kept  our  joyful  secret.  The  horizon  to  north 
and  east  still  reverberated ;  still  the  roads  fed  the 
weary  battalions  into  that  slaughter  mill.  These 
survivors  of  Armageddon  were  no  longer  boy- 
soldiers,  but  mature  men — hard-bitted,  bronzed, 
lean,  but  drawn  in  the  face  with  years  of  strain. 
To  tell  them  was  only  to  mock  them;  for  many 
who  marched  forward  that  day,  the  Peace  would 
come  too  late. 


180 


PAS-DE-CALAIS,  1918 


181 


We  fonr — tlie  Mayor,  the  Red  Cross  Major,  the 
French  Captain  and  I — were  ourselves  harbingers 
of  peace.  The  Allied  armies  were  going  forward ; 
village  after  village,  but  last  spring  locked  tight 
within  the  German  lines,  had  been  rendered  back 
to  France.  The  government  had  detached  the 
Captain  from  his  combat  battalion  and  sent  him 
to  do  the  preliminary  work  of  restoring  normal 
life.  The  Red  Cross  Major  had  joined  the  ex¬ 
pedition  in  order  to  see  what  America  could  do. 
We  had  picked  up  the  Mayor  at  Arras.  The  most 
substantial  citizen  of  his  village  in  the  Pas-de- 
Calais,  he  had  stayed  by  when  the  Germans 
entered.  In  1916,  however,  the  invaders  had 
cleaned  out  the  inhabitants,  repatriated  them 
through  Switzerland.  He  was  going  back  now  for 
the  first  time.  He  expected  little;  he  knew  that 
this  town — whose  name  refuses  to  come  out  from 
the  dark  caverns  of  my  war  memories — had  been 
a  6 *  center  of  defense’ ’  in  the  rear  works  of  the 
Hindenburg  line. 

As  for  the  Captain,  he  seemed  to  me  after  three 
days’  acquaintance  the  very  flower  of  European 
civilization.  In  private  life,  as  I  learned  after¬ 
ward,  he  bore  an  old  title  of  nobility.  But  he  had 
not  rested  on  the  glories  of  his  ancestors.  His 
Legion  of  Honor  he  had  won  long  before  the  war, 
for  brilliant  work  as  a  colonial  administrator  and 


182 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


organizer.  He  spoke  on  all  things  with  a  fine, 
mature  wisdom,  shot  by  engaging  flashes  of  a 
subtle  French  wit.  He  approached  staff  officers 
and  peasants  with  the  same  easy  courtesy,  the 
same  Gallic  sense  of  personal  equality. 

At  last,  cutting  with  many  difficulties  and  dis¬ 
putes  through  the  rear  transport  of  a  British 
division,  we  drew  up  our  automobile  behind  the 
camouflage  of  a  broken  wall,  and  stood  in  the 
Mayor’s  town.  Or  what  had  been  his  town.  The 
Mayor  himself,  who  had  been  born  in  a  cottage 
on  the  main  street,  who  thought  he  knew  every 
stone,  spent  half  an  hour  orienting  himself.  That 
foundation  on  a  rise  of  ground  must  have  been 
his  house,  he  determined.  That  standing  brick 
wall  was  probably  his  brewery — no,  on  second  in¬ 
spection  it  might  be  the  common  granary.  We 
climbed  over  the  hillocks  of  ruin,  the  Mayor  mut¬ 
tering  puzzled  comments  and  question  under  his 
breath ;  stood  at  last  on  the  highest  mound  of  all. 
From  the  mass  of  ground  brick,  desiccated  mor¬ 
tar,  dust  and  filth,  protruded  a  jagged  bit  of 
broken  marble.  I  picked  it  up ;  it  bore  a  few  let¬ 
ters  of  inscription. 

“Ah!”  said  the  Mayor.  “Now  I  know!  That  is 
a  piece  of  the  memorial  tablet  to  my  father-in- 
law.  This  must  have  been  the  church!”  With 
this  new  orientation,  he  and  the  Red  Cross  worker 


PAS-DE-CALAIS,  1918  183 

started  on  another  voyage  of  exploration.  But 
the  Captain  and  I  still  stood  on  this  point  of 
vantage,  held  to  the  scene  before  us  by  the  very 
fascination  of  disgust.  Of  the  town  itself  re¬ 
mained  neither  building  nor  definite  street.  A 
sliver  of  wall  stood  here  and  there;  the  rest  was 
a  series  of  confused  mounds.  To  right  lay  a  space 
more  open  and  less  littered  than  the  rest;  and 
there  my  eye  stopped  on  a  set  of  human  rib  bones., 
They  were  bleached  white ;  they  could  not  be  re¬ 
mains  of  the  newly  dead.  .  .  .  Ah,  that  had  been 
the  churchyard;  these  were  the  old  dead,  arisen 
at  the  trump  of  the  Devil’s  resurrection.  All 
round  the  little  knoll  on  which  stood  the  village, 
the  Germans  had  run  a  line  of  dugouts,  half  of 
them  now  blown  open.  The  wooden  sills  and  lin¬ 
tels  of  the  nearest  was  charred.  Before  it  lay  a 
German  helmet.  Later,  after  inspecting  its  sur¬ 
roundings  to  make  sure  it  was  not  the  trigger  of 
a  booby  trap,  I  picked  up  that  helmet  and  kept  it 
among  my  few  war  souvenirs.  For  at  the  top,  the 
hard  enamel  paint  is  burned  and  blistered  away. 
The  conquerers  had  cleaned  out  this  dugout 
with  liquid  flame;  the  dead  German  who  wore 
xt.  ... 

Beyond,  stretched  an  insane  landscape.  Four 
years  ago,  these  were  most  fertile  fields,  their 
little,  checkerboarded  patches  bearing  the  record 


184 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


crops  of  Europe  in  grain,  sugar  beets,  potatoes. 
Down  the  tree-shaded  roads  plodded  the  great 
French  draft  horses,  heroically  big,  luxuriously 
fat,  hauling  this  produce  to  the  thriving  market 
towns.  All  along  the  horizon,  the  steeples  of  neat 
peasant  villages  rose  from  clumps  of  trees. 

Now — even  the  soil  was  gone ;  blown  away  down 
to  the  dirty  clay  subsoil.  There  remained  neither 
road  nor  tree  nor  village.  In  their  place  ran  a 
grotesque  network  of  fallen,  broken,  military 
works.  Here  and  there  the  trenches  deepened  into 
gullies  where  you  might  have  hidden  a  mansion. 
Over  all  lay  strewn  the  dunnage  and  offal  of  a 
city  dump — artillery  wheels,  junked  ambulances, 
broken  cannon,  old  clothes  and  shoes,  broken, 
rusty  bayonets  and  rifles.  Through  my  glasses, 
I  could  pick  up  even  more  sinister  remains  of  old 
battles — skulls  and  thigh  bones.  The  burial 
squads,  following  our  advance,  had  attended  only 
to  the  newly  dead.  These  were  emptyings  from 
the  trench  graves  of  four  years,  redug  by  in¬ 
tensive  shell  fire.  Near  the  horizon  would  break 
out  here  and  there  a  metallic  flash,  followed  by  a 
distant  shaking  reverberation.  These  were  our 
heavies,  creating  more  desolation  in  intact  fields 
fifteen  miles  beyond.  An  aeroplane  droned 
monotonously  overhead,  and  a  sheet  of  tattered 
corrugated  iron,  by  some  whim  of  battle  still  at- 


PAS-DE-CALAIS,  1918 


185 


tached  to  a  shattered  wall,  clanged  dismally  in 
the  autumn  wind. 

I  turned  to  the  Captain.  From  his  six-feet- 
three  of  stalwart  height  he  was  looking  down  on 
me.  He  first  broke  the  silence. 

“ Isn’t  it  all  foolish !”  he  said. 

“It  is,”  said  I.  “It  must  be  stopped.’ ’ 

He  shrugged  his  shoulders,  French  fashion. 

“How  can  it  be  stopped? ”  he  asked.  “Look — 
my  hobby  is  the  ancient  Greek  philosophers. 
Their  works  and  commentaries  upon  them  fill  half 
of  my  library.  I  read  them  constantly.  And  I 
cannot  see  that  the  moral  nature  of  man  has  im¬ 
proved  in  these  two  thousand  years.  No!  This 
is  folly,  folly,  but  man  cannot  make  it  cease.  It 
can’t  be  done.” 

We  had  been  speaking  French.  Somehow,  I  did 
not  care  to  dispute  the  question  with  him  there 
and  then ;  but  I  gave  my  answer  to  myself,  under 
my  breath  and  in  my  own  tongue. 

“It  can  be  done!”  said  I. 

Then  I  forgot  desolation  in  the  burst  of  a  new 
idea.  I  had  stated  in  four  words  the  American 
creed.  That  was  the  thing  for  which  I  had  been 
searching  all  these  war  years.  As  I  watched 
European  peoples,  penetrated  the  European  mind, 
my  native  conceit  in  my  own  country  had  sus¬ 
tained  many  a  shock.  There  were,  for  example. 


186 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


the  little  red  schoolhouse  and  the  peerless  Amer¬ 
ican  university.  I  had  discovered  that  the 
average  French  or  German  carries  into  his  uni¬ 
versity  a  better  equipment  for  thought  than  the 
average  American  graduate  carries  away.  I  had 
once  despised  the  education  of  Oxford  and  Cam¬ 
bridge,  while  admiring  the  graces  and  beauties  of 
their  scholastic  life.  Now  I  perceived  the  fluidity 
of  mind,  the  real  capacity,  somehow  developed  in 
the  Briton  by  his  universities.  I  noted  that  the 
average  Frenchman  in  the  ranks  understood  that 
the  Great  War  had  a  mightily  complex  origin; 
while  the  American  doughboy  said  “The  Kaiser 
started  it”  and  dismissed  further  thought  on  the 
subject.  Yet  something  not  yet  formulated  had 
sustained  my  national  pride.  We  possessed  a 
virtue  of  character  which  they  lacked.  What  was 
it  ?  This  interchange  with  my  French  captain  had 
draw  it  from  me — the  expression  of  our  greatest 
national  quality — “it  can  be  done.” 

While  they  hesitate,  bound  by  tradition,  fet¬ 
tered  by  their  very  complexity,  we  look  the  prob¬ 
lem  in  the  face,  and  set  ourselves  to  solve  it.  We 
dared  in  the  beginning  to  say  that  we  were  done 
with  kings ;  for  a  century,  nation  after  nation  has 
been  following  our  lead.  That,  so  far,  is  our  con¬ 
tribution  to  civilization.  In  face  of  the  fall  of 
the  Dutch  Republic,  the  early  eclipse  of  the  Puri- 


PAS-DE-CALAIS,  1918 


187 


tan  Republic,  we  said  “It  can  be  done” — and  it 
was  done.  We  were  only  a  fringe  of  white  settlers 
on  the  edge  of  an  untamed  wilderness  larger  than 
Western  Europe.  In  a  century  we  made  it  an 
ordered  modern  nation.  Our  national  will  did 
that,  our  mental  and  moral  courage,  our  refusal 
to  believe  that  any  obstacle  was  insuperable.  I 
realized,  looking  that  morning  over  the  blasted 
fields  of  Pas-de-Calais,  that  if  any  spiritual  force 
ever  ended  war,  it  would  be  this  quality  in  the 
American.  Only  dimly  did  I  perceive  then  what 
now  I  know;  that  these  United  States  had  been 
by  a  turn  of  fate  thrown  into  the  position  of 
dominant  nation.  I  see  now  that  Empire  of  the 
old,  sordid  kind  is  ours  if  we  wish  it;  but  also 
that  we  have  the  opportunity  to  create  a  new  and 
finer  thing — an  Empire  of  the  spirit  which  will 
lift  mankind  to  a  new  plane  of  progress.  We  have 
only  to  say,  as  we  said  in  the  face  of  kings,  of 
unnumbered  perils  and  obstacles  in  the  untrod¬ 
den  wilderness,  “it  can  be  done.” 

But  now,  five  years  after  the  Armistice,  we 
hesitate,  afraid  of  thin  phantoms.  We  listen  to 
the  counsels  of  narrow  and  false  self-interest.  We 
let  the  withered  hands  of  old,  timid  men,  whose 
capacity  for  new  thought  died  thirty  years  ago, 
blot  the  bright  scroll  of  resolution.  I  do  not  know 
my  America  in  this  period.  Has  our  soul  sud- 


188 


CHRIST  OR  MARS? 


denly  gone  flabby?  Or  are  we  only  blind?  And 
what  can  toughen  our  soul,  open  our  eyes,  save 
that  power  which  has  wrought  conversion  and 
borne  light  these  twenty  centuries  ? 


0) 


THE  END 


/ 


DATE  DUE 


GAYLORD 

PRINTED  IN  U.  *  A. 

